


A Numb Significance

by redyucca



Series: no, you move [3]
Category: Captain Marvel (2019)
Genre: But yeah there are explosions, Established Relationship, F/F, Found Family, Homophobic Language, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Maria is also a cool superhero, a superhero story informed by a cynical POV, introspection is better than explosions!, it's a family trait really, just like her wife and daughter, now with temporal shenanigans, tw: f-slur, yes sapphic love is the hero of this story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2020-02-07
Packaged: 2020-02-23 18:46:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 45,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18707821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redyucca/pseuds/redyucca
Summary: Carol accidentally exposes Maria and Monica to the same radiation that changed her. Everyone has a different plan of action for how to deal with it.---





	1. Chapter 1

 

 

 

> _Denial--is the only fact_
> 
> _Percieved by the Denied--_
> 
> _Whose Will--a numb significance--_
> 
> _The Day the Heaven died --_
> 
>  
> 
> _And all the Earth strove common round--_
> 
> _Without Delight, or Beam--_
> 
> _What Comfort was it Wisdom -- was --_
> 
> _The spoiler of Our Home?_
> 
>  
> 
> _\- Emily Dickinson_
> 
>  
> 
>  

* * *

 

  **1986: The Wedding  
**

 

Carol nearly face-planted on the way up the stairs, but, in a display of athleticism so remarkable Carol surprised herself, she caught the top step with her hands, rolled over them, and did a lackluster somersault onto the porch. She lay listening to her heart beat, staring up at the fan, before turning to Maria, three-steps down.  
  
Maria barked out the beginning of a laugh before slapping a hand over her mouth. Carol didn’t bother with such a polite gesture and let her guffaws echo across the dry front lawn.  
  
“Carol, you moron,” Maria hissed through her silent laughter. “Get the fuck up!”  
  
Carol, still giggling, flopped her arms around, trying to find purchase against the worn wood of the porch, with all the grace of the truly drunk.  
  
“Shouldn’t have had that last margarita,” Carol muttered, pushing herself onto her knees.  
  
“And yet,” Maria said, holding a hand out and leveraging Carol to her feet. “Here we are.”  
  
Carol swayed forward, her hazy gaze catching on the glimmering strips of blue reflecting off Maria’s cheekbone, the glow of leftover Christmas lights strung across the neighbor's roof in June.  
  
“What?” Maria asked, voice rough against the pregnant silence.  
  
“I like tequila,” Carol whispered, like it was a secret.  
  
“Oh, do you?” Maria laughed softly.  
  
“I like you, too,” Carol said. “And Monica.”  
  
“Yeah, she’s alright,” Maria agreed giggling and fumbling for her house key.  
  
“Best baby in the whole world,” Carol said sincerely.  
  
Maria paused, blinking hard through her inebriation, trying to parse something under the surface.  
  
“Carol,” she began, dropping her hand out her pocket and stepping away from the door. She balanced herself against the banister.  
  
“I know, I know,” Carol said, rubbing her forehead and smiling in a heartbroken sort of way. “I’m not saying—I’m not asking—I’m just—”  
  
Maria closed her eyes and let the fresh desert wind cool off her face. The house she was renting was ramshackle and perpetually dusty, but she wanted Monica to have someplace open and free for the first few years of her life—free from the closed in walls of cities and the streets barely surviving against the pull of time. The striking permanence and liveliness of ranches and dried juniper stretching beyond their little yard might give Monica something to hold onto, rather than an absent father and an exhausted Mother, whose own family had washed away in her limited memories years ago.  
  
And then there was Carol, standing there, as sturdy as stone, hammered yet careful, not even asking.  
  
“It’s too _much_ , Carol,” Maria said, avoiding Carol’s heated eyes. “I can’t let you.”

Carol nodded and tripped over to the porch swing. She collapsed onto it and glared up at Maria.  
  
“I’m going to be here, anyway,” Carol said, full-voiced, dropping the whisper, as if she hoped that little Monica would hear that promise drifting across her two-year old dreams. “I can’t let _you_ , Maria. You’re my family.”  
  
Since that fated first kiss, Maria had been stalwart against complicating their lives, unmoved by Carol’s own insistence that she could handle the risk. And while she wasn’t lying, it was beside the point. The point—  
  
“I love both of you,” Carol said, settling down on the swing, shoving the dry, weathered pillows into strategic positions and closing her eyes against Maria’s wavering smile. “Don’t say anything now—we’re both off our tits—”  
  
“Carol, come inside, I have a couch,” Maria said, her voice sharp and floating along the crest of an deep wave.  
  
“No,” Carol mumbled into pillow. “No, this is good.”  
  
“Carol,” Maria whispered, asking for something, though she wasn’t clear on what.  
  
Carol flapped her hand at Maria and mumbled once more, “Nope.”  
  
Maria watched her fall asleep, standing on the brink of something profound, caught between two very different realities. She could almost see the split in the dimension herself, the two different universes paralleling each other until this exact moment on Maria’s crappy porch in the middle-of-nowhere Arizona, where the skies were clearest—  
  
She went inside, wobbling with each step, letting the rush of liquor cloud her vision and numb the depth of her own feeling. She snagged a couple blankets from her living room and went back outside, barely remembering to catch the screen door before it slammed against the frame. She walked slowly over to Carol—Carol who was staging a weird protest on her porch swing, Carol who couldn’t hold her tequila but also did a fine job singing the lower third when Maria warbled through Tina Turner, Carol who was there at Monica’s birth, there at Monica’s birthday, Christmas, Easter, birthday again, Carol who just stopped by with groceries, with games, with time and patience and—  
  
Maria draped both blankets over Carol’s sleeping form and went back inside to wake the babysitter. 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**1996**

Maria shoved her way through the front door, juggling the groceries piled above her chin.

“Monica!” she shouted in no particular direction, hoping Monica was at least inside and she wouldn’t have to go searching through the brush on such a blistering day. “Monica, a little help please, hon!”

She kicked the front door closed and attempted to waddle to the kitchen, muttering threats to the potatoes that were slowly making their escape out the bottom of the wet paper bag (the frozen strawberries didn’t stand a chance).

She heard Monica giggling in the kitchen as she approached the doorway and shouted again, clutching uselessly at the potatoes, “I’m frying okra tonight but you ain’t getting any if you don’t move your rear!”

Suddenly, the ripping bag was alleviated from her grip and before she could properly relay another snippy remark to her lazy twelve-year old, her entire breath caught in her throat.

“Let’s not resort to desperate measures just yet, Maria,” Carol said, hoisting the bag onto one hip effortlessly, grinning like a maniac.

Maria dropped the rest of groceries.

“ _Mom_ ,” Monica groaned, sliding off her perch on the kitchen counter and gathering up the spilled apples rolling every which way. “You’ll bruise ‘em.”

“You’re back,” Maria tried to say through the emotion lodged in her esophagus. “I thought—”

“Jesus, Maria,” Carol said as she carefully placed the bag on the table, turning her face away from Maria’s gaze. Maria’s eyes zeroed in on the flush on her neck, hiding underneath a frizzy braid. “No need to be so surprised. You’re acting like I had no intention of visiting. I _said_ I would, didn’t I?”

“Not in so many words, no,” Maria managed, her eyes still caught on the pink of Carol’s skin.

“Oh my god, Mom,” Monica said, having deposited the apples in the fruit bowl (unwashed, Maria noted). She placed her hands on hips and glared up at Maria, projecting embarrassment and disappointment all in one go.

“Why are you being so weird?”

Maria tore her gaze away from Carol’s neck, who was now casually leaning against the table, a stifled smile stuffed under her fist. 

Monica raised her eyebrows at her mother’s gape-faced silence.

“I just thought,” Maria began again, hesitating on how to describe in a friendly way that she had thought Carol had essentially abandoned them to another stretch of lonely years in which she would always be on the verge of coming out to Monica’s grandmother—as if that would somehow legitimize the fact that her common-law amnesiac wife had left her for the entirety of the universe.

Carol’s maniacal grin grew softer at the break in Maria’s voice. She uncrossed her arms, pushed back the wisps of hair escaping her french braid, leaving her scarred hand on top her head, and said, “I said I would be here.”

_Ten years ago._

Carol shrugged like a kid, stubbornly and casually and painfully sincere. At that gesture (at the words setting Maria’s hair on end), Maria shook off all the warring reactions crowding her head and settled on the easiest one. She walked forward and scooped Carol’s boyish burning body into a hug.

“So...” Monica cut in, as Maria forced herself away from the strange stormy scent of Carol’s hair. “Do I get fried okra or not?”

Carol laughed, her ugly guffaw of a laugh, which Maria had to tune out so she wouldn’t start crying.

“Alright, ma’am,” Maria said, turning to Monica, who had plopped down at the table and started fishing through the un-dropped groceries. “Did you hang the laundry like I asked?”

“Ok, I tried to,” Monica said, still concentrating on finding the bag of okra. (She wasn’t going to find it—Maria was collecting some fresh from Kimmy down the street). “But our stool broke and I couldn’t reach so I just laid it out on the ground with some rocks and stuff.”

“Monica.”

“What?” Monica responded, defensively, throwing her arms out. “I improvised!”

Maria held onto her stern frown long enough for Monica to wither.

“The okra is at Kimmy’s,” Maria said, keeping her amusement leashed. “Go get it now or me and Carol will be eating alone.”

“But mom,” Monica started.

“Monica.”

Monica glowered and then, in a move that carved straight through to the core of Maria’s pain, looked to Carol, hope written on her face.

“Auntie Carol?” she pleaded. Maria watched as the power of Carol’s affection brightened her entire body, the amused and slightly unhinged smile from before melting, like ice meeting a summer day, and replaced by the tenderest and smallest curve.

“I’ll see you back here with the okra, Lieutenant Trouble,” Carol said. “And make it quick, I’m starving.”

Monica’s pout was courageously unreserved, but she still snatched up her sandals by the back door and marched her way out, grumbling, “Ol' cajun Kimmy and her dumb smelling dogs…”

~

“I’m kinda impressed,” Maria said, surveying Monica’s handiwork with the laundry.

“Impressed enough to leave it?” Carol asked.

“Nope,” Maria laughed.

“Well, let’s get to it,” Carol said, clapping her hands and rubbing them together. Funky little sparks flew off her fingers at the friction, but Carol didn’t seem to notice.

They worked calmly, gathering up the stray bits of laundry laid out on the lawn, still wet in the unrelenting Louisiana humidity. Maria breathed through her worries and love, focusing on clipping up the sheets and bath mats, focusing on the heady scent of summer, letting the cicadas and crickets and other marsh sounds drown away her heartbeat. _I said I would be here._

Carol worked methodically, still grinning a little stupidly, and continuously ducking Maria’s gaze under the brim of a camo baseball hat. As Maria threw up a raggedy quilt, blocking Carol from view, she realized she couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Carol,” she called, dropping the clothespins to the grass and following them. The ground was warm, but she was shaded from the direct sunlight, in between the breezy bedding shuffling playfully in the dense air. Carol popped into view to her left, peaking from behind Monica’s space-themed sheets.

“Yes, Maria?” Carol asked.

Maria filtered through the millions of things pushing against her lips before choosing her plan of attack. “Why are you here?”

Carol raised her eyebrows, disappearing them underneath her cap, and twisted her mouth in a mock disappointed pout.

“Why, Maria,” she said, bringing her hand to her chest. “Aren’t you happy to see me? Here I am, helping you with your laundry—”

“Carol,” Maria breathed out, both a question (and a blessing).

Carol stopped her charade with a stuttered blink. She stepped out from behind the sheets.

“Maria,” she said, visibly swallowing. “I don’t… I’m not…”

The crazed glint in Carol’s form was growing more pointed. Maria, instead of sitting in witness to a universe splitting in two—the parallel angling away from the what was once the same path— Maria felt again the pull of one anchored moment. Carol was here, in Louisiana, but she was also there, in Arizona, and there, streaking across the atmosphere.

“Maria,” Carol started again, her voice clearer, but much softer, almost drowned out by the singing insects. She pushed the hat back on her head, exposing her sweaty hairline, breathing deeply.

“Maria…" she whispered. "My Maria.”

So it wasn’t Maria this time who decided.

Carol’s tense and unhinged air crumpled as she walked slowly forward and dropped to the ground in front of Maria. Their bare knees only just brushed against each other. The hair on Carol's legs was soft and downy.

“I _knew_ there was something more,” Carol said, reaching for Maria’s chin to hold her attention steady. “I _knew_ there was something you weren’t telling me. I was so confused. I had only just met you but I _knew_ you.”

Maria reminded herself to breathe. Carol’s hand was hot on her face, hotter than the day itself, but it was almost a balm to the small explosion happening just underneath Maria’s skin.

“Carol, I’m so sorry,” Maria said roughly, holding Carol’s fingers tightly against her own neck.

Carol’s smile was so large and didn’t budge as she shook her head frantically. “No, don’t be—”

“But I am,” Maria insisted, scratchy and desperate. “You were lost and I wanted to help but I wanted you _back_. And to tell you what you were, what you were to us--that would have been asking too much—”

Carol tackled her, wrapping her inhumanly strong arms around Maria’s ribs, nearly lifting her off the grass and onto her lap. Maria threw her arms around Carol’s shoulders and tucked her face against the side of Carol’s precious neck. Maria’s relief at being so close to her again rocked her, shifted her world back to something familiar and beautiful.

“You can never ask too much of me,” Carol said against her shoulder, one hand rubbing up and down Maria’s spine and the other cupping the back of her head. “It’s impossible. Even when I didn’t remember who you were to me, you still could’ve asked me for anything.”

“Would you have stayed?” Maria asked, going straight for the hardest question.

“Yes,” Carol said without hesitation and Maria teared up at the certainty.

The breeze blowing through the shaded lawn eased the crackling around their bodies. It was 103 degrees and climbing as the evening approached, much too hot to be in the tight embrace of a superhuman person running hotter than the Average Jane. Yet Maria stayed where she was. Carol pulled her face off Maria’s shoulder, and nosed her way up her neck and across her jaw. The hand at the back of Maria’s head gentled and Carol’s fingers delicately dug past her hair to her scalp, careful not to tug or twist. Maria’s eyes closed incrementally as the tip of Carol’s nose pressed against hers, sliding against the top of her cheek. Maria ran her own fingers over the sensitive skin under Carol’s eyes, down the side of her face, down to her lips.

When they kissed, a southerly gust met with a westerly, and they were enveloped in sweet-smelling linens and the sound of rejoicing spanish moss.

~


	3. Chapter 3

They found a routine, somehow.  
  
Carol couldn’t be on Earth too many days in a row. For the year that she was away, regaining memories and homsickness, she had somehow built a fledgling reputation among the countless civilizations who had suffered under the authoritarian arm of the Kree. She had made contact with several diplomatic forces and she and Talos were rapidly becoming the first people anyone called when a world or culture was threatened. Maria could barely muster up any sort of desire for Carol to abandon such new obligations and certainly didn’t waste the energy trying.  
  
Carol’s schedule was flexible but she managed, almost miraculously considering, to always have at least a week on Earth for every two weeks she was away.  
  
She had pulled out a calendar the morning after she first returned and a fresh pack of colorful sharpies.  
  
“Ok,” she said around the pink marker cap in her mouth. “Talos said that the distress call from Nowhere was definitely something that could be handled by local enforcement—he checked it out himself, don’t worry, no gold fascists or whatever they were called—which gives me until next Friday before I have to meet up with him and a couple of bandits who might be terrorists...or like Robin Hood...There’s honestly no way to tell at this point.”  
  
“Funny how easy it is to confuse those,” Maria remarked into her coffee. She was hungry as well but Carol put her foot down that they would be waiting for Monica before they walked down to the cafe for beignets.  
  
“Well hopefully we can make a call before deciding to partner with their network,” Carol said in a distant way, not caring at all what she was meant to be saying and caring perhaps too much about the way Maria’s hands gracefully curled around her mug.  
  
“Did you need some more coffee?” Maria asked, setting her own down and leaning her chin on her hand.  
  
Carol mimicked the gesture, pulled the cap out of her mouth with two fingers, like she would a cigarette, and said in a low suggestive voice, “I need something, alright.”  
  
Before Maria could give a _proper_ response, certainly one less verbal, she heard Monica’s thumping down the stairs.  
  
“What you need is some class,” Maria muttered to Carol, sipping at her coffee again, as Monica came crashing into the kitchen.  
  
“You’re still here!” Monica said breathlessly, her eyes wide.  
  
Carol hid her wince well and recovered quickly.  
  
“I’m here for a week and half, actually,” Carol said. “If that’s okay with you.”  
  
“Where else are you gonna go, huh?” Monica asked, crossing her arms and stomping around the counter. “Who else is gonna take you in?”  
  
Maria set down her mug abruptly but Monica didn’t budge and Carol’s fierce glare was so obviously a facade that Maria held back her reprimand.  
  
“You got a point there, Trouble,” Carol said. “Luckily for me, you and your mama are too well-mannered to kick me out like the bum I am.”  
  
Monica said, “You're welcome.”She gave a sincere nod before she started cracking up.

Carol joined her, tugging Monica even closer and onto her lap. She clung to Carol’s neck, situating herself on her right knee, her laughs resolving into giggles as Carol tickled her side.  
  
“Come on,” Carol said, gesturing with her other arm to Maria, and then patting her left thigh.  
  
Maria scoffed in amusement but didn’t hesitate to throw herself at her, sure now that Carol and her weird strength would catch her. Maria also didn’t hesitate to press a smacking kiss to Carol’s mouth, with exaggerated sounds and puckering up, while Carol’s body shook with the effort to not laugh.  
  
“Ewwww, y’all stop, ughhh,” Monica shouted, sticking her skinny hands between their faces.  
  
Later, when they had loaded up on fried dough, coffee and chocolate milk, chased a few innocent ducks around the park, and had traipsed home singing a new song Monica was learning so she could memorize the quadratic formula, Monica had sat down with Carol’s calendar and markers, along with a handful of stickers of her own, and systematically written down the days Carol must absolutely be on Earth.  
  
“Obviously, you already know when my birthday is,” Monica said, adding three more stickers to the June 21 square. “You got Mama’s birthday, and Grandma’s, and yours, duh, and Christmas, and Halloween. Oh! And, —Mama when are my swim meets?— I need you to go to those ‘cause Mom worries too much and gets into fights with other parents.”  
  
“I’m sorry, could we return to that,” Carol said, grinning wickedly up at Maria. “You get into fights?”  
  
“Ain’t gonna tolerate any nonsense, is all,” Maria said quietly, feeling herself flush as she doodled a little chain of roses along the border of JULY.  
  
“Grandma had to pull your ear,” Monica recounts, delighted.  
  
“You weren’t there, sweetie, you don’t know,” Maria tried to argue.  
  
“Oh but Grandma told me _all_ about it,” Monica said, dragging out the ‘all’ for at least three seconds too many. “And Sammy told me, too.”  
  
“Sammy did not tell you,” Maria replied. “That child is an angel and would never gossip about his betters.”  
  
“Well, he will if you threaten to take his dolls,” Monica said, returning to the calendar.

"Monica, what have you done to Sammy's action figures?"

“Nothing," Monica said, unconcerned. "Not yet anyway. That reminds me, you should be here for Sammy’s birthday, too. His family always have a barbecue and his Nana makes the spiciest rice n’ beans.”  
  
“Sounds like something I need to see for myself,” Carol said softly. “Write it down.”  
  
“Monica Rambeau, you are going to apologize to Samuel the moment we finish with this.”  
  
~  
  
It was only a few days later that Carol found herself sat between two rocking ladies on their old, low-down porch, sipping a cheap beer.  
  
Monica and the other children were racing around the lawn, playing a heated game of 'sharks and minnows' that a sweet-faced quiet boy (the infamous Sammy) was winning effortlessly. Monica got herself tagged on the first round every time, thrilling at the chance to be the tallest shark in the yard.  
  
“And how’d she take it?” Eva Wilson was saying to Monica’s grandmother, her father’s mom, Adelaide.  
  
“It was worse than you can imagine,” Maw Maw Addie replied, shaking her head. “Poor thing had never been challenged like that before—couldn’t handle it, I tell you.”  
  
“What was the call?”  
  
“‘Not a word’,” Addie said, enunciating with drama. “Apparently it was Anglo-Saxon, or some such. Haven’t a clue how Mary-Ann ever came across an anglo-saxon word, but there it was, plain as day in the tiles.”  
  
“Wish I could’ve seen her face,” Eva said. “She’s always so smug on _Scrabble_ night.”  
  
“Wish we would’ve been playing for keeps,” Addie added, and they both laughed shrilly.  
  
“Y’all are a couple gossips,” Maria said through her grin, opening another beer and taking a swig. “I’m ashamed to be sitting here with you both.”  
  
“Don't be worrying about me, dear--I ain't your mother,” Addie said, solemnly. “You got your own daughter to look after, though.”  
  
“She’s a wild one,” Eva agreed.  
  
“Always thought she got it from me,” Addie said, before turning her piercing gaze on Carol, who was mesmerized by Monica’s attempts to referee all the kids into declaring her the winner despite always being tagged. “But now, well, I’ve met the mysterious Auntie Carol.”  
  
Carol met Addie’s eyes over her spectacles, mouth firm.  
  
“I’m not all that mysterious,” Carol replied, her thumbnail pushing down on the wet paper label of the Shiner condensing in her hands.  
  
“Been away long enough to be mysterious, I think,” Addie retorted. Her tone was easy but she had stopped her rocking.  
  
“I already told you,” Maria started, but Carol knew she had to have this conversation, one day or the other.  
  
“Not by choice,” Carol said, looking down at her fingers and the smattering of burn scars on her knuckles.  
  
“Yes, exactly, that’s what I want to hear,” Addie said, pointing. “Let’s hear about your choices.”  
  
“I’ve got a pretty wicked party trick,” she said. “It’s an international secret, but sometimes I get pulled away to perform it. There’s a certain demand for my party trick.”  
  
“Pulled away where?” Addie pushed.  
  
Carol hesitated but Maria decided for her.  
  
“All over the galaxy, Addie,” Maria said dryly.  
  
“Well if you don’t want me to know then don’t tell me,” Addie grumbled. “No need to lie to me, hon.”  
  
Maria rolled her eyes and Carol scanned her face, cataloguing all the places she would kiss later, silent placeholders for the apologies Maria wouldn't accept.  
  
~  
  
It was about two months after Carol’s return that Fury showed up on Maria’s doorstep—again.  
  
“Marvel sent me,” he said, holding a cat carrier in one hand and a covered pie tin in the other. “Wanted me to check in on home base. Do you need reinforcements?”  
  
Maria laughed and grabbed at the pie. “If this isn't pecan, then you can leave.”  
  
“It’s sweet potato, you ungrateful—” he didn’t finish, pushing his way in the door and shutting it quickly against the evening bugs.  
  
“Monica is at a sleepover,” Maria said, dropping the pie onto the coffee table and picking at the golden crust with the thumb that wasn’t entirely covered in grease.  
  
“Well, good, we can split it in half, then,” Fury said, opening up his cat carrier and shedding an unseasonable jacket. “God, I hate this part of the country.”  
  
“The south?” Maria asked. “Or the bayou?”  
  
“The part that means I’m drinking air instead of breathing it.”  
  
“You didn’t have to show up here,” Maria said. “Could have called.”  
  
Fury ignored her as he made his way into the kitchen. Maria picked off pieces of crust while Goose investigated her feet. The quiet house from before was suddenly bustling and Maria tried not to swallow it up too quickly for fear of making herself sick. She could still feel the burn of Carol’s skin on her hips, the intensity of their goodbye three days ago still sending shock-waves through her body. While Monica had taken to the pattern of Carol’s arrivals and departures, adapting to them like any military brat, Maria was left grasping at something solid every time Carol touched down and every time Carol lifted off.  
  
Fury shuffled back into the living room with a pitcher of lemonade, a bottle of cognac, and two plastic cups and forks. He handed off a cup and the cognac to Maria and kept the pitcher to himself as he plopped down on the ground in front of the couch.  
  
“You’ve got a little something…” Fury said, gesturing to Maria’s greasy coverall with an empty cup. “Everywhere.”

Maria snorted, pulling out her rag from her back pocket and wiping her hands with as much ceremony as she could muster. She dropped it on the floor, smirking as Fury flinched away from the grease ball. Maria poured a generous serving of cognac, took a throat-shredding gulp, and then dug right into the middle of the pie.  
  
“You didn’t answer my question,” Fury said, picking up the second fork and following Maria’s example. “You in need of reinforcements?”  
  
“If you’re offering to babysit,” Maria said, around a sweet mouthful. “Feel free to stop by anytime. But we’ve got a pretty good community here. Monica’s grandmother has us whipped into shape.”  
  
“I absolutely wasn’t offering to babysit,” Fury said, his hand absentmindedly finding its way to Goose’s soft chin. “I ain’t baby-proofed.”  
  
“Monica’s twelve years old,” Maria said.  
  
“I ain't baby proofed,” Fury repeated, sitting up straighter, adopting a strange queenly posture as he sipped on lemonade and took prim bites of pie.  
  
“Ok,” Maria said, biting through her own smile.  
  
They ate and drank in silence, letting the light in the room shift across the floorboards and carpets, orange sliding into evening gray.  
  
“Marvel sent me an update, by the way,” Fury said nonchalantly. “Made contact with a new humanitarian group, apparently.”  
  
“What, you mean the Xandarians or the Frost Giants?” Maria asked, swirling her cognac.  
  
Fury choked on his lemonade and sputtered out, “Excuse me?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“And how do you know that?” Fury asked, his causal tone slipping to the same anxious pitch from when they had first met.  
  
“Um, she told me?” Maria said, resisting the ‘duh’ that was trying to slip off her tongue.  
  
Fury took several seconds to stare at her then at the ice cubes in his glass before taking another sip of his drink.  
  
“Goddamn classified information, just handing it out willy-nilly,” Fury muttered to no one in particular, but hoping _someone_ in particular might take it to heart.  
  
“Nick,” Maria started—  
  
—She shoved past at least two-hundred muscle spasms, a twisting stomach threatening to upend itself, a blanket of coldness and fear, and a ringing warning made up of the collective voices of every person in her head, every person she ever was, she shoved past it all and—  
  
“She’s my _wife_ , Nick,” Maria said.  
  
Fury didn’t react at first beyond a very soft side-eye stare. Then he gulped down the rest of the lemonade, poured himself another glass, and said, “Ok, but classified is classified.”  
  
Maria sipped her cognac, flushing from the surface of her cheeks to the pit of her stomach. The burn pushed through a shiver of relief and she was able to move forward in time without bursting into tears.  
  
“I won’t spill the beans to anyone,” Maria said, sipping her drink again, feeling ready to smoke the world.  
  
“Uh-huh,” Fury said, with all the attitude of a put-upon bureaucrat. “That’s what she said to me first.”  
  
“I already said,” Maria grinned. “I’m not anyone. I’m her _wife_.”  
  
Fury had a difficult time hiding his pleased and bashful smile underneath his eye-patch.  
  
~  
  
Fury ended up on Maria’s doorstep like clockwork, as frequently as Carol, lugging around a cat, a pie, and news from across the galaxy.  
  
~  
  
Carol came home for a whole month in October, claiming it was the most convenient plan, what with Monica’s swim team in the finals, softball season starting soon, Halloween obviously being a big deal, and that Talos had “stuff” under control.  
  
 Her claim was completely contradicted when Talos himself and his daughter showed up for the championship meet, both wearing “Number 1” foam fingers and t-shirts with Monica’s face on them.  
  
That was also the day that Addie met an alien for the first time.  
  
“Do Alice Coltrane,” Addie said, snapping her fingers in Talos’s face, now a spitting image of Louis Armstrong.  
  
“Like I just said,” Talos almost whined, crossing his arms. “I can’t be someone I haven’t seen.”  
  
“Who hasn’t seen Alice Coltrane?” Addie asked, throwing her arms up and trying to share a look of indignation with a laughing Maria.  
  
“Not all of us are jazz elitists, Addie,” Maria said.   
  
"What's 'jazz'?” Talos asked.  
  
“Now that’s just despicable,” Addie started, getting ready to deliver a long and specious lecture about the importance of the Greatest American Genre that ever was and why Aliens worlds away should know about it.  
  
Carol was on her stomach on the floor playing monopoly with Monica and Bripteth, Talos’s daughter, but kept shooting Maria delighted looks as the bickering between Addie and Talos reached new heights. Goose was sitting comfortably on her back, knowing instinctively where the warmest spot in the room was, and Maria wished she could shrink down to the size of a cat and curl into Carol’s arms.  
  
Later that night, while Fury walked Addie home and Talos put the children to bed, Carol led Maria out to the hammock. She lay down and pulled Maria with her, wrapping Maria up in her oversized sweater and holding her close.  
  
“Space is really cold, you know,” Carol said, tugging Maria closer.  
  
“So I’ve heard,” Maria mumbled into Carol’s shoulder.  
  
“Monica is such a strong swimmer,” Carol replied, as if they had arrived on that topic minutes ago.  
  
“She hates backstroke,” Maria said.  
  
“Yeah, she had a whole rant worked up in her last comm,” Carol said. “Something about hearing nothing but seeing everything?”  
  
“Hmmm,” Maria sighed, opening her eyes to the soft cotton on Carol’s steady beating chest. “Do you think she has any existential anxiety?”  
  
“With you for a mom?” Carol snorted. “Are you kidding?”  
  
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Maria asked, glaring at Carol’s jaw, not wanting to move.  
  
“Remember when I asked you how to jumpstart a car?” Carol said. “And you ended up explaining the basic axioms of quantum mechanics?”  
  
“As if you could handle the basic axioms of quantum mechanics,” Maria muttered.  
  
Carol laughed, throwing her head back, before curling even more around Maria, kissing her hairline.  
  
“Have you ever thought about teaching? I mean, you have that certificate…” Carol asked in a whisper, treading softly.  
  
Maria shrugged under Carol’s arms but her gaze wandered past the hammock, past the overgrown lawn, into the brush beyond. It was dark and she could see the shapes of a swampy night moving under the starlight. Something told that if she stared hard enough at the pitch-black edges and gaps in the foliage, she would be sucked into oblivion, where everything is a perpetual summer and the unfolding seasons would only ever unfold into more darkness and more heat.  
  
“I don’t think I would be a good teacher, Carol,” she admitted. “Not sure its in me to follow a curriculum.”  
  
“Not sure its in you to be a Reservist and a general mechanic, either,” Carol said gently.  
  
Maria shrugged again and pushed her face up against Carol’s collarbone. She hid from the promising emptiness of the endless wild marsh.  
  
“Aviation mechanic,” Maria corrected.  
  
“Oh, so the ‘general’ part is just pro-bono, then?” Carol joked, knowing full well that Maria’s ‘favors’ to her neighbors and friends were as far from charity as it got. They would watch for Monica, she would watch out for their car-engines; reciprocity at its simplest.  
  
“I should get into yacht repair,” Maria added. “Private planes, millionaire boats, and celebrity mercedes-benz—that’ll pay Monica’s college tuition, right?”  
  
“Nah,” Carol said. “The U.S. government is going to pay her tuition. Unless they want to deal with Kree-hired mercenaries on their own.”  
  
“Gonna hold the welfare of the country ransom?”  
  
“Clinton will do anything I ask.”  
  
“Ask?”  
  
“Demand.”  
  
“How about DADT?”  
  
Suddenly Carol’s embrace was crushing and the humid air sucked dry.  
  
“Hey,” Maria said, poking Carol’s ribs. “Relax, boo.”  
  
Carol let out a bitter ‘ha’ and released her strangle-hold.  
  
“Sorry,” she said gruffly. “Just, _fuck_ that. And fuck DOMA, too. You'll be taken care of, if I--won't be like last time, not that there _will_ be--”

Maria did not want to look anywhere near where Carol was hinting.  
  
“Should I just give you my list of complaints now or do you think you can get him here in person?” Maria asked, closing her eyes and letting herself drift off under the protective urges of Carol and Carol’s deep-seated anxieties.  
  
“Give ‘em to me, I’ll pass ‘em on,” Carol said, fiercely.  
  
 _I’ll protect you_ , she had said once, lips lighting up the sensitive skin of her naked shoulder, when Monica was embryonic and Maria’s world was bound by the atmospheric sky, _I’ll protect both of you._  
  
~  
  
Maria worked freelance, keeping busy hours but keeping them on her own terms. There weren’t a lot of people who could flight-test planes who weren’t contracted by Boeing or the Air Force, weren’t a lot of qualified engineers who could stay on the ground and service someone’s private jet and ensure an untroubled trip of overpriced travel and under-priced champagne, weren’t a lot of people who only had to show up on a base once a month for a physical and another new way to sign her into silence about Carol’s disappearance and subsequent reappearance and subsequent new inter-galactic peacekeeping missions.  
  
Maria was in a delicate place, professionally, but her family was taken care of and that's as far as she allowed her wishes to go.  
  
~  
  
Growing up on the crowded side of Houston, where the pines broke and the un-sheltered concrete streets were hit hard by every hurricane blowing its way through the Gulf, Maria learned how to cut through the mugginess and uncertainty of culture, if not by necessity than by spiritual desire. Her father had died long before she could know him, her mother had tried to press her into a mold with spikes in vulnerable areas, and her grandmother had left them behind, just as Maria was getting ready to destroy herself, citing an urge to remember where she came from, before the giant city of highways and asphalt parks pre-destined the rest of her life.  
  
Maria had a friend in high school—tall and athletic but someone inching their way out of their neighborhood. Nicole would drag Maria with her to various bars and open mic stages across the city, places where Texas singer-song writers went so they could write themselves into legend. Sometimes the patrons of these venues would bestow upon Nicole the most bizarre and spiteful looks, like a black girl and her guitar weren’t the foundations of the music they loved so much. Most of the time, though, the rooms were smoky and thick, clear-cut and wooden, and Maria could sit at the bar, underage-mark on her sweaty hand, and wait for the whole establishment sequester itself outside the stamp of time.  
  
When Nicole started singing, crunchy and strong like Elizabeth Cotten, simple and forthright like Lead Belly, but loud and new, as any new musician is when they first step onto a beer-stained stage—Maria saw a spinning earth reverse on its axis.  
  
She fell in love with a musician, strumming out a blue-chord, turning every color in the room blue, and Maria knew she was in trouble.  
  
 _I love her_ , Maria had said to her mother. _Like you loved Dad._  
  
 _Goodbye_ , she might’ve said. To save time.  
  
~  
  
When one flies, one doesn’t lose all weight and definition. There’s no special place to shelve the pull of gravity. It’s always there.  
  
Maria was fearless in flight school. While she chafed under the discipline of basic training, grew angrier and angrier the further she shoved her way into the Air Force and all its intense and misplaced bravado, Maria excelled in a way that no one else could quite manage.  
  
She knew fear better than any of her peers. They were introduced to the depth of it on their first leap onto a cushion of empty air. Maria carried it with her, like the pull of the earth.  
  
Perhaps that’s why Carol had been a life saver. Carol, who was a bitter pill of a person, who had somehow lived Maria’s life on the other side of the country, with different people, and a different horizon.  
  
Carol only ever pretended to fly for the thrill. She had really enlisted to fight.

“I like knowing about it,” Carol had admitted, two weeks into their training, as they scrubbed down the mess kitchen. “I just, I want to know what we’re doing. I need to know.”  
  
“We, as in the military in general?” Maria scoffed, as she tried to pick a piece of burnt rice on the stove.

“My dad was in the army,” Carol said. “Violent person, the whole way through. Figured I was the same way.”  
  
Maria hummed in acknowledgment, but otherwise kept her judgement to herself.  
  
“Bet you enlisted to be an astronaut, though,” Carol said, voice muted, her whole head in a pot as she scraped away at the bottom.  
  
“What makes you say that?” Maria asked through a grunt.    
  
“You have the best sims, you’re majoring in physics, you’ve got stars in your eyes, you’re already in talks with manufacturers,” Carol listed nonchalantly.  
  
“Excuse me, I’ve got what in my eyes?” Maria asked, pulled up short, staring at Carol’s filthy back.  
  
Carol emerged from the pot, her face covered in soot, grinning wickedly.  
  
“Stars, babe,” she laughed. “Remember when we were told to push atmo, a week ago? You were like, doing a Neil Armstrong impression. Going higher, further, faster—“  
  
“Ok, Jesus, I get it,” Maria cut her off.  
  
“I mean,” Carol said, her face pale and joyful under the creaky fluorescent light. “That you came down and you weren’t even high, you know? No jitters, no cold flashes, nothing. You came down and it was like—you didn’t have to...”  
  
Carol seemed to realize what she was revealing, her aggressive smirk fading as her cheeks heated up. Maria watched her carefully, feeling every cell in her body light on fire as her eyes trailed Carol’s jawline and her clenched fists. She took a breath, fighting down the urge to push Carol against grimy wall and press her lips to the exposed skin in the dimple of her collar.  
  
Maria returned to her task, feeling as alive as she had a week ago when she could see the periwinkle blue of the day-sky fading into infinite black, and she said, not meaning a word of it, with a voice straight from a rough throat:  
  
“NASA is for pussies.”  
  
~  
  
Carol was there on Christmas, laden with far too many gifts from Fury, and with a popping vein in her forehead.  
  
Maria had been roped into a training gig mid-November and for the three-weeks that Carol was away, she had been tied up with the worst sort of stress. Monica’s worries about Carol were feeding into her own, and Addie, while a backbone of caring and dependency, was increasingly skeptical of Carol’s obligation to the universe at large.  
  
“I just don’t think she should be messing around on other planets when we got natural disasters ripping up whole communities in her own backyard,” Addie chatted, tutting about the price of her favorite brand ice cream in the grocery store.  
  
“Carol can’t stop hurricanes, Addie,” Maria said, tired of the conversation and tired of Carol not being there to defend herself. It was her longest absence by far, two weeks and three days, and her check-in with Fury had apparently been tense and cut short.  
  
“Well, she could put the fear of god in a certain political party, if she wanted,” Addie said, grabbing Maria’s hand and squeezing as hard as she could.  
  
When Carol finally arrived home, her hair was two inches shorter, clearly a rush job to hide some singe, and the bags under her eyes were practically leaking into the corners of her mouth.  
  
“The Frost Giants are dealing with an insurrection,” Carol said, nearly chugging her whiskey while Maria fiddled with the brakes on a neighbors Harley. “I didn’t want to get in the middle of it, but they’re such a vulnerable people and some elitist jackasses called the Asgardians are just constantly threatening to upend their whole goddamn planet.”  
  
“Do you need to be there now?” Maria asked, as neutral as possible.  
  
“No,” Carol said firmly, but Maria could see the worry eating away at the color in her eyes. “No, the opposition on Asgard is pretty fierce and my contact there, Heimdall, seems to think things are going to hold steady for another decade or so, at least.”  
  
“How’s he know that?”  
  
“He sees things,” Carol said. “I don’t know how to explain it. He just, he sees things.”  
  
“What like a fortune-teller?” Maria asked, reaching for the WD-40.  
  
“I don’t know,” Carol replied, rubbing her forehead and squeezing her eyes shut. “I just know that tensions with the Frost Giants are the fucking least of everyone’s concern.”  
  
Now Maria had to fully stop her task to give Carol her attention. In the past six months, Carol had only reported twice that Earth might be in danger, but both times were really just distant threats, consequences that might occur down the line based on Carol’s work and if anyone ever found out where Marvel was from. The last alien threat, almost two years ago, still gave Maria sleepless nights.  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
Maria’s garage was silent and chilled and peaceful. The breeze was meandering and the Christmas lights that Monica had insisted on stringing up were tinkling slightly with every push in the wind. Carol was worried.  
  
“There are some powerful actors,” Carol said, clearly and emotionless, as if she was addressing an officer. “Terrorists of sorts. Not looking for an empire or anything like that. As far as I can tell, they’re just operating on some dangerous political agenda. Some cult-like kind of agenda. Talos and Heimdall seem…disturbed. And these people have, like, wizards.”  
  
Maria dropped her tools in her pocket and walked around the bike to where Carol was sitting on a bench. She tugged Carol’s arms off her her knees and replaced them with herself.  
  
“Wizards, Carol?” Maria asked, as Carol’s hands automatically gripped her waist.

Carol tilted her face up to Maria’s, her eyes swimming with love and anxiety.  
  
“People that can manipulate matter in ways I haven’t ever seen before,” Carol whispered. “I only had one encounter with one of them and, well, it was terrifying.”  
  
Maria pulled Carol’s head to her chest, her fingers tangling in her smoky hair. Carol’s was breathing heavily against her sternum, like a soft promise Carol was trying to press into Maria's body—the same promise, said over and over, like a spell.  
  
“We’ll get through,” Maria said.  
  
Talos had been providing her with space-ship schematics, old manuals and parts, to go along with his lessons for her and Carol on the space-politics beyond Earth’s borders. She was prepared to be at Carol’s side should Carol need her again.  
  
For all that, she felt useless. Carol was cursed with something invasive, a perpetually burning fire in her body. And Maria was powerless against the limitations of it. If Carol burned herself out, as she was prone to do out of sheer justified anger, then Maria wouldn’t be able to reach her.  
  
And then Carol wouldn’t be able to reach Maria as Maria was sucked into endless white oblivion.  
  
~  
  
  
Carol stayed for a week and half, up to the last day of Monica’s holiday break. She and Fury had finally worked through a small deal with the Xandarians and Skrulls and U.N. Alien Division—Carol was entitled to family income, a solid paycheck dropping unceremoniously into Maria’s account every two weeks, as if Carol was just a solider and Maria was just a spouse at home.  
  
“In the eyes of the World Security Council,” Fury said, handing over the first check, directly to Maria, bypassing Carol who was cuddling with Goose on the couch. “You and Monica are Marvel’s next of kin. Took a lot of bureaucratic yelling and paperwork to get this going to y’all and not to a certain Robert Danvers, who as far SHIELD is concerned, only shares Marvel’s last name by coincidence.”  
  
Carol snorted, meanly.  
  
“The Air Force has also been notified of your change in security clearance and has given you a pay raise,” Fury continued. “Apparently, a Reservist who knows more than some Generals needs a little extra incentive to do as she’s told.”  
  
“As if,” Maria said bitterly.  
  
Fury grinned and said, “You’ll get a call, Rambeau. One day or the other. Combat restrictions don’t matter when aliens forces are knocking on your doorstep. Your new rank is Captain, so you better get used to hearing it.”  
  
~  
  
Carol made it home twice before Valentine’s Day, so seeing her that blustery Friday morning was not enough to assuage Monica’s mood.

Monica, who was itching with all the romantic angst of every middle-schooler, had shouted that she didn’t want any valentines presents from her mom, and slammed the door on her room so loud that she knocked loose an ugly ceramic plate from the wall.  
  
“Did you ask if she could be your valentine?” Carol said before dumping an entire box of conversation-hearts into her mouth.  
  
“Well, I guess, in so many words,” Maria fumbled, embarrassed and annoyed about a nice breakfast being ruined for such a stupid reason.  
  
“I’m kind of offended you didn’t ask me,” Carol said, having chewed through the candies at record speed. Burning across the fabric of space as quickly as she did was taxing and the only way Carol seemed to enjoy recovering was by inhaling enough sugar to give a normal person a heart attack.  
  
“Like I _need_ to ask you,” Maria said, glaring down at her grits.  
  
“Think I’m a sure thing?” Carol teased, opening another box and upending them onto her tongue.  
  
“I _know_ you’re a sure thing,” Maria said, leaning back in her chair at the table and trying not to laugh at Carol’s puffed out chipmunk cheeks.  
  
Carol shoved away from the counter she was leaning against and sauntered towards Maria. She was chewing rapidly, steam flowing from her lips, the ridiculous sound of teeth on conversation-hearts filling the kitchen.  
  
“Ah ‘oo shor?” Carol said, some candies spitting out at the fricative in ‘sure.’ She leaned against the table, her elbow on Monica’s abandoned place mat, her neck extending, her biceps pushing her breasts together and up under her body.  
  
“Am I sure?” Maria repeated. “Baby, you are so in love with me it’s shameful.”  
  
Carol finally swallowed the last of the hearts and grinned so wide a couple crumbs fell off her lips.  
  
“Fuck yeah,” Carol said, sultry and fond. “But I ain’t ashamed.”  
  
~  
  
That night, Maria came home from work to her two girls snuggling under a blanket on the back porch. Not wanting to interrupt but severely curious, Maria opened the back door a crack and listened to them through the screen.  
  
“How do you know he only gave it to you as a friend?” Carol was asking.  
  
“He called me ‘dude,’ Auntie,” Monica whined. “ _Dude._ ”  
  
“I call your mother ‘dude’ all the time,” Carol countered.  
  
Monica giggled and Maria could see her moonlit curls bouncing she she shook her head.  
  
“No you don’t,” Monica said. “And it’s different anyway.”

“How so?” Carol asked.  
  
“Well,” Monica said, her voice leaping in pitch, clearly uncomfortable. “Well, you _are_ friends. You’re friends who just kiss sometimes.”  
  
Maria sank to the floor, her heart beating fast enough to make her body cold. She pressed her ear against the crack in the door.  
  
“That’s what a girlfriend is,” Carol said quietly. “A friend you get to kiss sometimes.”  
  
“But you’re not my mom’s girlfriend,” Monica protested.  
  
“Then what am I, Lieutenant?”  
  
Monica hesitated and said, “Um, well, I don’t know. You’re just not her _girlfriend_.”  
  
Carol was silent for several long seconds. Maria watched her hand rubbing up and down Monica’s hunched shoulders.  
  
“I’d marry her if I could,” Carol finally said.  
  
Monica’s instant response was, “I wish you could.”  
  
Maria nearly wrenched the door open in her hurry to be with them.  
  
“We’re already married, _cher_ ,” Maria said, stepping down to Monica’s other side and pulling the other end of the blanket around herself. Monica nuzzled into her shoulder and Maria couldn’t help littering her head with kisses.  
  
“I want a wedding, dude,” Carol replied. “Monica as the flower-girl, Addie as the minister, in a barn with twinkly lights—”  
  
“I’m going to stop you right there,” Maria said. “Addie is a Catholic and will have a heart attack if we ain’t married with a proper mass.”  
  
“We’ll hire a local band for the reception,” Carol continued. “They’ll know all the Cajun standards, of course, otherwise half the town won’t show up.”  
  
“I know _Jole Blon_!” Monica piped up. “Maw Maw Wilson taught it to me.”  
  
“Alright, so Monica will be singing _Jole Blon_ with the band—”  
  
“I only know the first verse,” Monica said quickly. “And my hands aren’t big enough to play Maw Maw Wilson’s guitar—”  
  
“We’ll dance all night,” Maria said. “I’ll dance all night with my wife. My wife and my daughter and my wife’s daughter. Me and my wife and our daughter.”  
  
Monica burst into tears.  
  
“Oh, Monica, darling,” Carol said, sliding to sit in front of Monica who was hiccuping and hunching further in on herself. Carol placed her large hands on Monica’s knees and leaned her chin on them.  
  
“Monica,” Carol said. “You already know I’m here for you in whatever way you want me to be. Don't need permission from some silly government license to make sure of that.”  
  
Monica nodded and fell into both of their embraces.  
  
“We’ll get married in June,” Maria said, petting back Monica’s hair and gazing unblinking into Carol’s fiery face. “We’ll invite the whole neighborhood. I’m going to put a ring on your finger.”  
  
~  
  
In May, the wedding plans were well under way.  
  
“ _Why_ do you need to marry her,” Addie asked as she pounded the dough.  
  
“Dear, you’re ruining it,” Eva remarked, looking askance over the edge of her glasses. Her sudoku book was open on the counter and was gaining a sheen of white flour.  
  
“I’m doing no such thing,” Addie said. “I’m just asking an innocent question. Y’all already living in sin—why ask for more of the lord’s judgment, huh? Give him a break, hon, let him rest easy with your soul.”  
  
“Maw Maw, can I have a popsicle?” Sammy asked, his hands still busy with the small bit of dough Maria had spared from her batch to play with.  
  
“Of course you can, cher,” Eva said. She helped him off his stool and handed him two cherry Captain America popsicles from the fridge. “You go run and give one to Paw Paw in the garden, alright. And tell him to put on his damn hat, the silly man.”  
  
Sammy obeyed eagerly, shouting as he barely made it out the door, “Paw Paw! You’re silly!”  
  
“Addie, I don’t care what you think,” Maria said, rubbing away the dough stuck to her fingers. “Carol and I are going to exchange rings and say I love you in front of God and the world and you are going to show up for it in your best Sunday hat.”  
  
“And who is going to preside over this ceremony, hmm?” Addie asked, pointing her rolling pen menacingly.  “Who did you rope into this charade?”  
  
“Mrs. Wilson,” Maria said, not even bothering to worry about throwing Maw Maw Wilson under the bus.    
  
“Eva?” Addie twisted around, her hand clutching her chest, projecting the drama of the betrayed. “You agreed to this--this--this insult to God?”  
  
“Only one insulting God here is you, darling,” Eva replied, concentrating on her sudoku. “Insulting the lord’s sacrifice with that overworked bread.”  
  
Addie spluttered and Maria left the room, hoping they could work it out between them and she wouldn’t have to argue any further.  
  
She found Sammy and Mr. Wilson in the tomato garden, singing and getting their cheeks sticky with red popsicle.

“Well, hello, dear,” Rusty Wilson greeted, tipping his hat. Sammy copied the gesture and then saluted with his dripping popsicle stick.  
  
“Afternoon,” Maria said, kneeling down on the cold damp soil and digging her hands into it. The clean dirt sunk into her pores and she breathed through her panic.  
  
“I was wondering, dear,” Rusty said. “About the wedding. Sammy here has told me that him and Monica are preparing a song for the reception and I was just wondering if you would allow me to sing one, too. I got the perfect one for this occasion.”  
  
“If it’s _In the Pines_ , I don’t think that would be appropriate,” Maria replied. At family gatherings, Rusty had the habit of collecting an audience for both his incomprehensible rambles about purity and family interspersed with every old blues song out there that was, explicitly or not, about sex.  
  
“Oh, now that is a good song, don’t you think so, Sammy?”  
  
Sammy nodded sagely, cherry juice dripping down his chin.  
  
“But no, don’t worry,” Rusty continued. “I got a good song for weddings. Celebrating love.”  
  
Maria leaned back and put her feet out in front of her, giving her toes the same dirt treatment as her hands.  
  
“Mr. Wilson,” she began, feeling grateful for the old man. “You can sing however many songs you want at my wedding. Just so long as you turn up.”  
  
Rusty laughed and said, “Why, who doesn’t love a wedding? To me, its a promise against the will of time! Which is only a promise to God and his son—God who made time. Time which takes us away from the world and from our loved ones. But, as John says, ‘God is love.’ So how do we live with faith? With love, of course.”  
  
“That’s nice, Mr. Wilson,” Maria said. “Helping Eva with her ministry?”  
  
“That’s the testimony she gave me when she proposed,” Rusty replied, gazing affectionately at his tomato plants.  
  
“Can I have another popsicle?”  
  
~  
  
For the last week in May, Maria was receiving sub-space comms from Carol twice a day, watching her yard fill with flowers, receiving the well-wishes of so many neighbors and friends, either in the form of gifts or in the form of RSVPs, was hosting Fury and Goose in her home, was working on an old crop-dusting plane that was almost ready to take flight once more, and was incandescently and unbelievably happy.  
  
~  
  
Maria’s bedroom door banged open and she was hit in the face with her old seaman’s duffel.  
  
“I need to get you out of here, now!” Fury demanded.  
  
Maria shot from zero to sixty, her legs sliding into her jeans and feet into boots within thirty seconds.  
  
“What’s going on?” she asked over a loud thumping screech in her head. Fury was throwing handfuls of her clothes into her bag, saying, “Communication got cut during an earth-risk call. You and Monica are in danger. We need you in another country, yesterday.”  
  
“Earth-risk call?” Maria frantically asked over her shoulder as she ran down the hall to start packing Monica’s things.  
  
“Someone’s coming!” Fury shouted.  
  
Maria swallowed down the screeching in her head and stormed into Monica’s room.  
  
“Monica, hon, we need to get up,” she said, pulling Monica’s backpack off her desk and dumping her school things on the floor.  
  
“Mom?” Monica mumbled into her pillow. “What are you doing?”  
  
“I need you to get dressed, sweetie,” Maria asked, hearing her own chilly calmness edging out her voice.  
  
“Why?” Monica asked, rubbing her eyes and watching Maria’s movements in fear. “I don’t under—”  
  
“ _Monica_ ,” Maria said, but before she could fully snap, Fury was in the doorway, his eye wide and scared.  
  
“Too late to pack,” he said. “Let’s go.”  
  
Maria didn’t hesitate to pick Monica up and start racing down the stairs.  
  
“Wait, wait!” Monica shouted, slipping out of Maria’s arms and allowing herself to be dragged out to the car. Fury was speaking rapidly in code to someone on his phone and Maria could see his desperation written onto his shoulders, lit up by the dawn summer light. “What about Goose!”  
  
“Fuck!” Fury said into the phone, slapping it shut and turning to Maria who was trying to get her car keys into the keyhole.  
  
“Fucking denied transportation, those spineless _motherfuckers_!” he growled, pinching the bridge of his nose.  
  
Maria swept her gaze over Monica’s quivering form and Fury’s frantic one.  
  
“We need a plane,” she realized, blood rushing in her ears.  
  
~  
  
The race to the airport happened in a flash, with Monica breathing through her panic in the backseat and Fury yelling on his comms with various members of SHIELD, WSC, and the CIA. Maria took the back roads, speeding against the dust, concentrating on the skies, making small calculations about which plane would be the fastest to get up in the air the quickest.

The small Air Force base was mostly abandoned except by a few grunts stationed there to survey extreme weather. By the time Fury was done shouting, the grunts were moving, and Maria was sliding into the cockpit of two-seater F-22 training Raptor, Fury strapping Monica in behind her.  
  
“Honey,” Maria said, putting on the headset and sending her daughter a steady look. “I need you to breathe. That’s your job, ok? You need to keep breathing. Count it out. In French. Just keep concentrated.”  
  
Monica nodded, her voice shot from panic, her hands shaking as she pulled her headset on and Fury hooked up her mask.  
  
“The coordinates are input already,” Fury said. “I got a contact just outside Rio. Figure you’ll be used to rainy and humid weather.”  
  
“Have you heard from Carol, yet?” Maria asked, focusing like needle on the mission, ignoring the fact that her wife was probably floating out in space, frozen and dead.  
  
“No, but her comms aren’t down,” Fury said. “She’s just not on them.”  
  
“That’s not exactly good news, Nick,” Maria said, adjusting her goggles.  
  
“It’s not the worst either,” Fury said. “Clear skies, Rambeau. Save a dance for me at the wedding.”  
  
~  
  
Taking to the air with her daughter in the training seat was like crossing a busy intersection, eyes closed. Maria could hear Monica’s focused breathing, but otherwise she was silent. Too silent, too steady, too like her mother when she should be crying and screaming and being as terrified as Maria wished she could be.  
  
 _Carol is alive, Carol is alive,_ her heart beat.  
  
The chatter on her comms was full of spy-lingo above her pay grade, clearing the path of commercial and military flights on her way south to Brazil. She barely registered the noise, figuring it was a useless exercise anyway. She had passed 30,000 feet within five minutes of being in the air, and would have passed it sooner if not for the fear of Monica passing out.  
  
She was cruising 49,000 and climbing. She could see the sun rising over the curve of the earth. The blanket of clouds below them acted as a visual shield to the simple life for which she had been striving for the past year. For the past six years. For the past decade. Ever since the pregnancy test read positive.  
  
She made the mistake of feeling safe, speeding to her destination on the other side of the world.  
  
~  
  
“Fury, identify _now_!” Maria bit out, climbing higher in atmo, praying that Monica was still breathing. “Where the hell did they come from?”  
  
“I don’t fucking know, Rambeau,” Fury snarled. “It’s not showing up on our radars!”  
  
“Fucking satellites, Fury! Use them!”  
  
“We’re cut off from all sub-space comm—even the goddamn mars rover is dead in the water!”  
  
“FUCK.”  
  
Maria swoopped into a barrel role and began a random sequence of evasive maneuvering.  
  
“Taking fire!” she ground out, not bothering with the proper codes. Cut-off from satellite imaging, from nearly all comms including stone-age radar, Maria was alone.  
  
She had almost forgotten the feeling, the abandonment, the tightly wound strings on her lungs, making them bleed. Carol had made her forget and now Carol was dead.  
  
 _I’ll protect you…I’ll protect you both._  
  
“See you on the other side, Nick,” Maria said, before cutting off her comm. Monica was passed out in her seat, alive, and Maria was going to get her to safety—  
  
A crack of blue light blinded Maria’s vision and she was arrested on the spot, enshrined in a fiery blue sphere. The sudden stop tore across Maria’s momentum and her seat-belt nearly crushed her ribs in.  
  
“And here they are.” An eerie crisp voice echoed across the space within the sphere.  
  
A ship floated into view, one of the space-jump capable ships Maria had studied. On top of the nose stood a thin Alien, robed in black, gracefully perched as if he wasn’t in the thinnest of air hovering above the surface of earth, 55,000 feet below.  
  
“The family of a Marvel,” the alien said.  
  
Maria tore her gaze from him and glanced down at her control panel. It was if the plane had been put on pause—the engine was still running but it wasn’t, the life-signs still registering, though only registering the exact second that the alien had froze them in. Around them, a blue force-field of sorts was burning hot—Maria could see its reaction against the atmosphere. The blue was warping the line of the horizon in every direction.  
  
“There’s no escape here, children,” the alien continued. It was like his voice _was_ the air, instead of traveling through it. Maria twisted around in her seat as much as she could, relieved to see a glimpse of Monica, asleep and unbothered by their position.  
  
“Let her have a look at you,” the alien said, stepping off the nose of his ship, floating without effort on nothing at all. “It’ll make this so much easier without her will.”  
  
Maria turned off the engine. The combustion sputtered, the roar petered out, Maria was met with the silence of a world in between the void and everything else.  
  
(She had done this before. Her and Carol, always sent out on increasingly risky flights, were well equipped to handle a moment of free-fall. Engines on new planes sometimes stalled. Engines on old ones sometimes stalled. Sometimes the turbulence knocked something loose that should have been screwed on tight. Sometimes the material can’t handle the speed, the friction, the climate, or temp. Sometimes the void did its best to suck you in.)  
  
The plane stayed where it was, suspended in the fiery sphere, but Maria had faith in gravity.  
  
“Now, now,” the alien said. “No need to worry about an escape. There really won’t be one. For any of you.”  
  
Then he raised the arm not folded primly behind his back, and there, from the bowels of his ship, Carol emerged.  
  
She was bound with a silvery-gleaming rope. She was lit up, as she was letting her power free, except instead of the warm yellows and reds and purples, she was aflame with icy blues and whites. Her skin was snowy and her eyes were gleaming like LED lights. He jaw was open in an unheard scream.  
  
“ _Carol_ ,” Maria said, voice strangled, her hands coming up to her face, her fingers pinching her skin in horrific fear.  
  
“Get her a little closer, please,” the alien called back to whoever was piloting his ship. Carol inched closer, dragged along with an invisible pull, while the two air-crafts came nose to nose.  
  
“There we are,” he said. “Perfect. Now take a long look. And take that silly thing off so she can see you.”  
  
The alien flicked his wrist and Maria’s head-set, face-mask, and goggles flew off her face. The glare of sunlight on unfiltered air made her eyes water.  
  
Carol’s blue-lit eyes snapped, her back arching in pain, the fire around her growing whiter as she screamed without sound. Maria sat there, waiting to drop into the ocean below, wishing she could wrench them all from this moment—wishing she could reach down and pluck them from this dimension and place them all gently in another—  
  
“Now,” the alien began. He raised his arm again and with a flare he was holding the end of the silver rope wrapped around Carol’s burning body. He pulled on it and she writhed. He tugged her forward until she was only several feet from Maria’s face.  
  
“Destroy them,” the alien commanded.  
  
The white light ripping across Carol’s body exploded in their small sphere. It washed across Maria, hot and singeing, making the edges of her vision waver like a mirage.  
  
Through the heat she heard Carol’s voice, finally, sliding under the imperious echo of her captor.  
  
 _“No…”_

Maria heard her intimately, like a whisper.  
  
“I said,” the alien snarled. _“Destroy them.”_  
  
He yanked on her chains and Maria was aflame.  
  
~

  
The sun in Arizona was unrelenting. East Texas heat was impenetrable and the humidity made you feel like you were suffocating, but never in Maria’s life had she been able to feel the process of the sun actually burning her skin.  
  
“Welcome to the club,” Carol had laughed, splashing her hat with her water bottle.  
  
“I ain’t sharing my water once you run out,” Maria said. “How much longer is this hike anyway?”  
  
“Eh,” Carol said, pulling her ponytail through her wet cap and squinting up the trail. “Don’t know, really.”  
  
“This was literally your idea,” Maria said.  
  
“Yeah, but,” Carol said and made no effort to finish.  
  
Maria glared at her, her red, red skin, her sweaty back, her lopsided smirk, her dirty knees, and said, “I hate you,” before turning and marching back down the trail.  
  
“Oh, come on,” Carol called after her. “It’s not that bad.”  
  
  
~  
  
Maria opened her eyes to a vision on fire. She could see Carol’s body making impact with itself. The edges of her skin were flaming up, charring with the effort she made, and blurring—Maria could almost see the molecules that were once Carol escaping into the atmosphere, no longer bound by duty of Carol’s survival.  
  
Maria’s wedding vows were re-writing themselves rapid-fire in her mind, as she struggled to keep her head above the pain.  
  
 _—I’ll take you back to Arizona, back to the desert, back to the stars I know you miss. Not the stars far beyond and up close, but the ones we could see from the ground. The Orion stars with their story, which I know you care about more than the nuclear fusion and fission that makes them burn. I’ll sing Tina Turner even though I’m not actually a good singer. You’re a good singer. A sweet singer. When you sing to Monica, our daughter, it makes me want to cry—_  
  
Maria nailed her jaw shut with an iron will, but now she could hear Monica’s suffered cries and she couldn’t help the tears that tried to roll down her face. They evaporated instantly in the heat.  
  
“Rip them apart,” the alien said, his voice sinking down among them like a command on high.  
  
The white heat started to weave into her veins, hammering down on her bones. How her body was still there was miraculous, but she still breathed and she still felt the un-ending pain.  
  
 _—I’ll fly so high I could see the entire world laid out, flat like a map. I would reach down and pull you and Monica out and put you on the porch, when it was raining, remember. Susie from down the road had made us a green bean casserole and nearly gotten stuck in the mud. Desert storms were scary, but not as scary as the hurricanes from home. We all sat on the swing and watched the lightning in the distance. Monica was on your lap and your eyes were on me—_  
  
“Kill them.”  
  
The white heat under Maria's skin was turning green. The vines of flames around Maria’s body were growing cooler, thicker, stronger, reaching out for Carol who was limp and hanging there, having fought for too long against her own power. Maria's heart burst with love and the green flames wrapped gentle fingers around Carol’s body.  
  
“I think not,” the alien said, snapping his fingers.  
  
Carol’s whole body exploded.  
  
Perhaps if not for the taste of the Gulf below Maria, the gulf that had sent so many monsters her way growing up, Maria would’ve have exploded with her. But Maria’s fury and pain and love kept her woven together, and when she screamed the spell that paused her plane fractured, the blue hazy sphere dissolved and Maria was free falling with Monica, back to the ocean below.  
  
The green flames followed her, wrapping around her arms, weaving into the space between her ribs. She reached out with her heart and found Monica, surrounded and blanketed in Maria’s vine-like fire. She reached out to the engine, felt it stall beneath her fingers.  
  
She reached out to Carol and _begged_ for her, begged for her smile and dirty knees.  
  
The engine roared back to life just as a blood-red outburst lit up the sky above them.  
  
Maria grasped the joystick and took hold of the fall, pulling up out of the dive, skimming off the heated heavy atmosphere of 10,000 feet. They met the sea like an old friend and Maria hit the eject buttons as her last conscious thought.  
  
She dreamed of Carol’s arms, holding her like the buoyancy in a beach-side wave.  
  
~


	4. Chapter 4

The ocean was filthy. Everywhere Maria turned, slimy smudges of grease blocked her eyesight. She corkscrewed forward, taking in the murky deep waters. The surface was miles above her and endless miles below was the beat of darkness, the alien world of earth’s abyss. She hesitated in the cold water, unsure if she should plunge deeper or find a way home. The pressure on her feet was greater than on her head—the press on her bare skin was enticing. She breathed in the salt-water.  
  
“Maria! Maria, hon, please, just breathe, please—“  
  
Maria’s eyes were closed but she knew that the sand scraping away at her scalp and fingernail beds was tinted gray and stormy. The rich smell of the bay burrowed into her lungs. She felt heavy and shattered but at least she was here, lounging on the beach, calculating infinities.  
  
The sun was full of love, touching her face tenderly: even more tenderly than she was used to. She ate up the light brushing against her eyelids and, after a few warm moments, she realized the sunlight was putting her body back together.  
  
~  
  
“We’re gonna need someone a little more qualified.”  
  
“Talos is on his way—”  
  
“Oh, is he qualified?”  
  
“Who the hell is?”  
  
“Other than you?”  
  
“ _Fuck_ you.”  
  
~  
  
Carol had daily imagined conversations with Dr. Lawson. Most of the time they were bitter and pissed off—Carol did a lot of yelling at authority figures in her own head. A few times they were placeholders for Carol’s own thought process: an easy way for her to work through some of the more bizarre parts of her job. But, in spite of everything, the thing Carol most regretted losing with the Doc was her ability to translate Maria.  
  
Doc and Maria were cut from the same fibrous and curious cloth: endlessly inquisitive and discerning but not sharp or slicing. Their intelligence was soft and alive, patient and whole. They understood pragmatism only abstractly, accepted utilitarianism holistically and without reference to specific social demands, and they eschewed violence without trying. As much as Doc trusted Carol to fly her planes, she trusted Maria to know them.  
  
The Doc had wanted Maria to fly the plane that morning that Carol had lost herself. Carol had stepped in on instinct, almost aggressive in her effort to keep Maria on the ground that day, with Monica.  
  
If Dr. Lawson were here, Carol might demand an answer about the core and why it had poisoned her body. Carol might grip her face on either side and force the Doc to bear witness to a hospital bound Maria who only moments before needed help to breathe. Carol might ask how Dr. Lawson could have allowed something like this to happen, with all her grandstanding moral judgment and dissension. Did she really pay for the sins of her people? Or did she just hoist the responsibility onto Carol, who would rather rip her own body to shreds than fail?  
  
“Any signs of movement?” Fury asked from the doorway, holding a tray of coffee, Goose trailing at his heels.  
  
“She’s been waking up for the past three hours,” Carol reported tonelessly from her chair in the corner. She was huddled between the narrow arm-rests, resting her chin on her knees. She was still barefoot, having refused the socks and tennis shoes Fury had bought her. Even the sweats and t-shirt were almost too much for her to handle on her fragile skin.  
  
“And how are you doing?” Fury asked, stepping further into the room to sit on the second chair by Monica’s bedside. “Holding it together?”  
  
“As much as I can,” Carol whispered through gritted teeth. Her hands were tucked around her toes in an attempt to keep herself from leaking out from the ends. If she stayed in a cyclical position, she breathed easier.  
  
“Talos is here, with Bripteth,” Fury said. “He figured she would be a comfort to Monica.”  
  
“Sure,” Carol said.    
  
“Have you slept?”  
  
“Can’t.”  
  
“You’ve tried?”  
  
Carol was silent.  
  
“Ok,” Fury said. “Well, Coulson is gonna stop by at 0900 as my relief. Play nice or he’ll tell on you.”  
  
~  
  
Maria opened her eyes to the sound of Fury’s laugh.  
  
She was lying on a bed that was stiff and clean. The lights, the tucked in sheets, the steady noise, the distant tap of soft-soled feet on linoleum floors, and the lingering smell of sanitizer hit her in stages.  
  
She glanced around the room, catching sight of Monica (alive and asleep on the covers of a second-bed in the room), Fury, who had a handful of fries shoved halfway into his mouth, and Talos, who was examining his own fries and keeping them out of Bripteth’s reach.  
  
“Wha—” Maria choked out.  
  
Everyone in the room, except Monica, all turned to her instantly. Fury was at her side in two steps, helping her to raise her bed upright, Bripteth was at her other side, patting her shin with happy squeals, and Talos was gripping the bar over the foot her bed, practically sparkling with relief.  
  
“Welcome back, Rambeau,” Fury said.  
  
Maria forced herself to blink—she clenched her fist against the need to reach out to Monica.  
  
“And where is that, exactly?” she rasped, eyes narrowing on the closed window beyond Monica, drinking in the peripheral sight of peace curled around Monica’s rising and falling shoulders and the un-marked face cradled in her hands.  
  
“Hospital in Galveston,” Fury answered. “Where you all washed up.”  
  
Maria kept her eyes on the window, aching for it to open onto the sea. She started calculating how easy it would be to gather Monica up in her arms and run away with her—how she would lift the sails above their heads and leave the paved life behind—how she would learn to forget—  
  
“How is she?” Maria asked softly, counting Monica’s breaths.  
  
“Alive,” Talos said slowly. “Exhausted, but well.”  
  
Bripteth nodded sweetly at his words, patting Maria’s leg again, and said, “She was awake earlier. She taught me poker.”  
  
“Yes and it was an exhausting endeavor and put her right back to sleep,” Talos added, lifting Bripteth onto the end of Monica’s bed to sit protectively at her feet.  
  
“How much do you remember?” Fury asked, relaxing into the plastic chair on her right.  
  
“Enough to know we shouldn’t be alive,” Maria replied, closing her eyes so she could contain the feral and selfish cry wishing she had died this time, as well.  
  
“By all _human_ measures, you shouldn’t be,” Talos said, rolling his eyes at Fury.  
  
“Oh, don’t start again,” Fury groaned.  
  
“I’m just saying—”  
  
“So why are we?” Maria cut in, tilting her face forward and pretending like there was no chasm in her body into which she might sink. “Alive, how are we alive.”  
  
“How else do you think?” Fury snorted. “Carol’s too goddamn stubborn.”  
  
Maria had done this before—clothed herself in her grief so carefully that when people looked at her they assumed her heartbreak was her style, her fashion, her tone. She had kept Carol secret, kept what she lost secret, and she had grown both past the mourning and into it, like an imperfect haircut. But Maria now had a thousand more promises written across her memory than she had seven years before and the weight of them tore her seams loose.  
  
“ _Not stubborn enough_ ,” Maria lashed out, voice still mostly air.  
  
Fury opened his mouth and if he said a single word Maria was going to scream.  
  
Before he could, though, the curtains burst open and the window pane popped free of the frame. The morning sun dripped in and the air released into the hospital room sparkled green, carrying the bright smell of the bay.  
  
“Maria,” Carol’s voice said, sounding muted and short. For a moment, Maria was convinced her voice had floated in on the breeze and light. Then, following the path of the shimmering green air with her eyes, she found Carol in the doorway, her hair buzzed, leaning heavily on the wall, and breathing hard.  
  
“Oh,” Maria said, inhaling quickly, her mind roaring back to life. “You’re alive.”  
  
Carol’s whole body started to shake and her mouth twisted sourly.  
  
“Like I said,” Fury said, standing and putting his hands on his hips like a disappointed mother. “Too goddamn stubborn. Did you even leave the building, Danvers?”  
  
“I walked around the perimeter,” she replied, eyes on Maria, tuning out his frustration. Maria noticed dimly that she was barefoot. “All clear.”  
  
“I know it’s all clear, you fucking menace,” Fury snapped as he walked into her space, hands hovering over her shoulders. “Now sit down, you’re making me nervous.”  
  
“I’m fine, Nick,” she said, but she slipped past him and into the corner of the room, beneath the window.  
  
Maria leapt into action, throwing back the covers and pushing up against her pillows. Before her own bare feet could make contact with the floor, Talos caught her arms.  
  
“Whoa, there, let’s take it easy, Captain,” Talos said. “You’re still recovering.”  
  
Maria could not stop looking at Carol. Carol was eyeing her warily. Something was off. Something was severely strange. Maria felt like the grid of the earth had rotated two degrees east.  
  
Carol, huddled in the hospital chair, had a jagged burn on one side of her head, and her face was ashy and worn. The only color on her was a series of deep purple bruises and a pattern of red cracking lines down her arms, on her hands, at the end of her feet, and leading up her neck.  
  
“What happened to you?” Maria asked, throat hurting from the multitude of things she didn’t understand how to say. _How are you alive, you were dust the last I saw, you were dust and I was plummeting and on fire, I was on fire and so were you, we should be dead, you look dead._ “What the fuck happened?”  
  
“How much do you remember?” Fury asked.  
  
“Go ahead and assume nothing,” Maria replied, quietly desperate as Carol looked away from her.  
  
“It was one of the cult-leaders who I ran into months ago,” Carol said, squinting into the distance at something that wasn’t Maria. She sounded like she was speaking in the next room, muffled and struggling. “He traced me back here yesterday and he trapped me. Tried to enlist me. Then he tried to use me—like a weapon, or something. He has this machine that was built to contain Dr. Lawson’s core—so of course it could contain me—direct me.”  
  
Maria relaxed her hands and brought them up to her face, closing her eyes against the room of concerned looks. She gingerly felt around her hairline, buzzed short like Carol’s, and touched the scratches on her face. She could still feel them stinging with saltwater.  
  
“Something about what happened the day of the accident,” Carol said. “Something made it so the core was a part of me and could only respond to me. So in order to get the core, he had to…”  
  
“You stopped him,” Maria said, leaping forward thirty seconds in the conversation.  
  
Maria didn’t know where that certainty came from other than the fact that she and Monica were still alive and relatively unscathed. What she remembered was like a dream moving in small flashes in her mind but in her dream she remembered the burn, remembered that she could almost hear its will, its agenda for pulling apart her body and dissolving her life. She remembered the echo of Carol’s will, holding the fire back, sewing her body back together even as the entropy building inside her found nowhere else to go.  
  
“I tried,” Carol whispered, brokenly.  
  
“I’ve got reports of a retreat of the Wizard’s cult from Terra,” Talos said. “You two managed to exhaust one of their most important players. They’re regrouping. Heimdall told me they’ll be back, but, for now, they’ve learned their lesson. Terra is protected.”  
  
“They’ve learned where I’m from,” Carol retorted hotly, her voice still muted but giving the impression that she was trying to shout. “They’ve learned that I’ll literally destroy myself to protect it.”  
  
“You’re not _destroyed_ , Marvel,” Fury said with the air of someone repeating himself.  
  
“Fuck you, Fury,” Carol said, her temper retreating and her face dropping behind her folded knees.  
  
Maria couldn’t help it—her arms simply knew what to do, how she could comfort. She reached out her hands, shuffling further down the bed, ignoring the quiver on her fingertips and the strange smattering of green sparkling just slightly under her skin. Carol finally looked to her again, eyes catching on her arms and the invitation, and she flinched, her mouth pulling thin and her skin glowing cold.  
  
Maria’s arms fell back to the bed, too heavy to hold up, the green fading back. Talos and Fury were quiet while Maria told herself to wake up.  
  
“Bripteth, darling,” Talos said, gripping his daughter’s shoulder. “Why don’t you find Nurse Teresa? Tell her Maria’s woken up.”  
  
Bripteth nodded and scurried from the room, throwing one last anxious glance at Monica’s slumbering form.  
  
“So we don’t really know what happened up there,” Fury said, once Bripteth had closed the door behind her. “But we know what it did to you. Kind of.”  
  
Carol’s whole body was shivering and Maria was not waking up.  
  
“Long story short, you and Monica—,” Fury nodded to the other bed. “Y’all are both like Marvel here. Got blasted with her power. So now you have it, too.”  
  
Maria asked without wanting to know, “What’s the long story?”  
  
~  
  
The Museum of Natural Sciences in Houston had a planetarium, a McDonald’s, and at least several thousand exhibit halls with vaulted ceilings to house the dinosaur bones. Maria’s favorite part, though, was outside the entrance, situated neatly in the small garden shielding the parking lot from the front doors.  
  
The giant sun-dial, at least three-times her height from when she first laid eyes on it, loomed darkly over the museum goers, doing what it did best: telling the time. Every visit Maria made with her grandmother, she would race from the bus-stop to the black stone. She would walk around the face, stepping carefully on the inlaid roman numerals that she didn’t understand, before reaching the style (the gnomon, according to later research), which she would gaze up at, reverently but almost defiantly as well.  
  
“This was how people used to tell time,” her grandmother would explain. “Before watches.”  
  
To Maria’s young mind, the enormous sun-dial _was_ time—housed under the pretty pines of the southeast, among the densely flowered wet soil; reflecting the murky day with gathered rainwater, sparkling sweetly in the glimpses of sunlight slipping through Houston clouds; presiding over the clear water of a penny-filled fountain rushing between small pyramids rooted around the dial that labeled the cardinal directions; as Maria grew older, that fantasy grew stronger and she understood, better than anything else, that time didn’t pass. Time moved from one end of the sun-dial... to the other.  
  
Maria’s least favorite part of the Natural Sciences Museum was the pendulum. It terrified her.  
  
~  
  
“This matter-manipulator—”  
  
“Wizard.”  
  
“Yes, thank you Nicholas,” Talos said, patiently. “This _wizard_ commanded Carol, or Carol’s power but really just Carol, considering how very much the same they are…well, he commanded her to destroy you and sweet Monica. Carol, of course, did not want to do that, so when he forced her to unleash her power—which apparently will release on its own if Carol’s life is just about to end, which is what he did, just brought her to the edge of death but kept her tied to a rock or something on the cliff—anyway—Carol did not want to destroy you, so when her power was forced out of her it rushed into both of you to protect, apparently, not to destroy. Or something like that. Now here’s where it gets a little complicated.”  
  
“Brace yourself, Rambeau.”  
  
“There must be some latent gene in Terrans that links our species closer than we previously thought. Obviously, we all knew we were distantly related—we’re very similar considering this is now trillions of years of evolution after a certain species colonized this corner of the galaxy—let’s not get into the biological history of it, I need my science guy for that. The point is, the Skrull mimicry ability is just one form of one particular trait that we happen to share with some Terrans.”  
  
“A very latent particular trait.”  
  
“Perhaps—or maybe you all just haven’t thought the risk was worth the outcome. I mean, your Captain America came from essentially the same thing, right?”  
  
“I was always told he sprang up fully formed from a seed of ‘moral fiber.’”  
  
“A what?”  
  
“Never-mind, just, go on.”  
  
“Right, well…While Skrulls have the ability to mimic an evolutionarily similar creature they come in contact with, Terrans have the ability to mimic really crazy levels of high-frequency radiation they come in contact with.”  
  
“Some Terrans.”  
  
“Right, some Terrans.”  
  
“But how?” Maria asked. “Radiation? Are you serious? How does that work without us immediately shriveling up into a mass of tumors?”  
  
“Because I kept you together,” Carol offered in her new monotone. “Re-made your bodies as he tore them apart.”  
  
“More like, you taught them how to adapt to the radiation. Non-verbally.”  
  
Maria absorbed this as she analyzed the disparate blankness of Carol’s expression and the frightened way she held herself. Carol—not angry, but frightened.  
  
“So,” Maria said. “Is that why you won’t look at me?”  
  
~  
  
The pendulum was menacing and mean. It pretended to be steadier than the ground. Maria was wary of it at first and the longer she spent thinking on it, the more wary she grew.  
  
It reminded her of a nightmare she used to have:  
  
She was swinging, back and forth, pushing up higher and higher, feet extended. She could see the strain in her thighs as she stretched her legs from hip to toe. She kept swinging, growing faster, and she knew a disaster was coming. But instead of slipping off the seat on the down swing and plummeting to the ground, she slipped off at the peak of her ascent, face to the sky. She let go of the chains and flew off the swing. Aiming for the soft sand, on which she had landed many times before, she missed by a mile.  
  
She was left floating further and further away from the earth, lost and out of control in the empty air, like a forgotten balloon, surpassing even the birds, being dragged away from everyone and everything else.  
  
~  
  
“I _can’t_ look at you. I can't _touch_ you.” Carol answered, her edges blurring. “I can’t touch anyone. Otherwise I fall apart.”  
  
~  
  
 A Nurse came in, Bripteth on her heals. Maria noticed for the first time the SHIELD agents standing guard at the door.  
  
“Good morning, hon,” Nurse Teresa said softly, meeting Maria’s deadened stare warmly, tossing her two braids back over her shoulders. “How are you feeling?”  
  
She walked past Fury and Talos, not surprised by his true form, and moved to the space between Maria and the shaking Carol.  
  
Maria blinked slowly up at her and she bent down to Maria’s level without hesitation.  
  
“Any headache?” she prompted.  
  
Maria took stock of her body. She felt sore but nothing more intense than the day after a hard workout. She felt stiff, but only from lying tucked into a hospital bed for nearly a day. Her skin felt raw, like a layer of skin had been chafed away all at once. Her head was clear but something about the world, her actual gaze, seemed heavy and opaque. Looking down at her body, she could see her skin was unblemished excepting the very tips of her fingers, which were bandaged, pinpricks of blood poking through.  
  
“No headaches,” Maria answered tapping the pad of her right pointer finger on her left. It stung, like saltwater in the eyes. When she curled her feet against the sting, she catalogued a similar sensation on the tip of her toes, which were also bandaged.  
  
“Let’s leave those bandages alone for now, hon,” Teresa said smoothly. She picked up a clipboard from the end of the bed and began recording the time and vitals. “Well, you seem to be in perfect health. You had the beginnings of muscle atrophy in your legs but you’ve recovered pretty quickly from that. Neat trick.”  
  
She sent Maria a cheeky smile.  
  
“Once the doctor has a look at you, I think you’ll be free to go,” she said, replacing the clipboard. “Just need a week of bedrest at home, and you’ll be good as new.”  
  
“And my daughter?”  
  
“A little more bedrest for her, I think,” Teresa said. “She’s young but her health is steady. Keep her inside for a few weeks, I’d say. Her body needs to relearn…”  
  
“I’ll help her,” Bripteth volunteered. “I was the fastest mimicker in my class!”  
  
“I’m sure you were, _m’ija_ ,” Teresa said.  
  
~  
  
Once the doctor had given the all-clear, Carol shot up from her chair and was out the room in a flash. Fury sighed and followed after her, saying to Maria on his way out, “We ain’t done talking.”  
  
Talos and Bripteth helped Maria get dressed, keeping silent on Carol even though Maria didn’t bother to ask. Once she was on her feet and feeling more at home in her self, Maria knelt by Monica’s bedside and brought her hand up to Monica’s cheek.  
  
The green pattern erupted again as she made contact with Monica’s skin, but, again, she decided against paying it attention. Instead she traced Monica’s jaw with her bandaged fingers, and, needing more reassurance, she bent her fingers so she could gently follow the lines of Monica’s face with the her un-bandaged joints. She ran the back of her finger down the length of Monica’s nose and said, “Monica.”  
  
Monica’s eyes shot open instantly and watered at the sight of Maria.  
  
“Mommy,” Monica whispered on the beginning of a sob.  
  
Maria didn’t hesitate to lean forward and wrap Monica up into her body. She held Monica’s precious curly head against her chest, breathing with Monica’s stuttering cry, and making for herself a bubble of relief. She let Monica fill every sense.  
  
“Auntie Carol,” Monica said against her t-shirt. “She’s hurt.”  
  
“I know, honey,” Maria replied. “We’re gonna help her. I promise.”  
  
“I don’t think we can,” Monica said.  
  
~  
  
 **1986: The Reception**  
  
Maria watched Carol wake up, trying not to laugh at the grimace etching across her wide mouth. There was no way the porch swing was any more comfortable than the actual ground.  
  
“Ughhh,” Carol, said, rubbing her forehead and trying to stretch. Her body nearly tilted off the seat and she awoke abruptly, hands flinging out to catch herself. Her blood-shot puffy eyes swiveled around the porch, settling on Maria who sat there, sipping her third cup of coffee, (hangover mostly numbed by a gallon of water and three advil), newspaper folded in her lap, baby monitor resting near her hip.  
  
“What’s the story, morning glory?” Maria asked.  
  
“I hate you,” Carol said, shutting her eyes and laying back against the swing. “And tequila. I hate you and tequila.”  
  
“What was that?” Maria asked, raising her voice. “You don’t want coffee? Is that what you’re saying?”  
  
Carol winced and flipped her off without opening her eyes. Maria laughed.  
  
“Since you’re in such a good mood,” Maria said. “I was thinking we could revisit the conversation from last night. I have a couple questions.”  
  
“Christ, I bet you were the most annoying overachieving student,” Carol muttered, hanging her hand, her fingers brushing against the splintering porch wood.  
  
“Yeah, and I bet you were the class jackass,” Maria said, slurping loudly on her coffee.  
  
Carol flipped her off again.  
  
“Well, fire away, then,” Carol said, flapping her hand weakly. “No better time than the ass-crack of dawn, I guess.”  
  
“I was wondering why you kissed me,” Maria said, not bothering to frame it like a question.  
  
Carol sighed loudly.  
  
“Are you serious?” she whined. “Five months later, you finally wanna have this talk.”  
  
“Just answer the question, hotshot.”  
  
Carol lurched onto her side and rested her head on her bicep. She squinted against the sunlight but met Maria’s amusement unflinchingly.  
  
“I wanted to ask you to dance,” Carol said. “But there wasn’t any music and you would’ve thought I was weird. So I kissed you. Next best thing.”  
  
“You’re serious,” Maria laughed. “You’re actually serious.”  
  
“Cross my heart,” Carol whispered, closing her eyes again.  
  
“Let’s dance now,” Maria said, putting aside her coffee and newspaper and getting to her feet.  
  
“Let’s sleep now,” Carol grumbled, but allowed Maria to hoist her up from the swing and bring her arms around Maria’s shoulders.  
  
“Are we doing a two-step, here?” Maria asked. “Waltz?”  
  
“How about we just sway in place?” Carol said, pressing her mouth to Maria’s shoulder and leaning heavily against her. Maria just held Carol briefly, happy with the closeness—that happiness traveling up and down her spine.  
  
“No way,” she said delicately, her lips brushing against Carol’s heated forehead. “I ain’t about that sort of stagnancy.”  
  
Carol’s answering smile was so wide, Maria worried it would crack her cheeks in two.  
  
“Goddamn, I love you.”  
  
~


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just wanted to thank all y'all for your lovely comments--It really means a lot--just thank y'all so much

Fury called in a SHIELD agent as a taxi driver.  
  
“We’ve got you a safe house here,” Fury explained from the passenger seat, turning around fully so he could see Maria and Monica cuddled up in the back. “Nice beach-side home, you’ll love it.”  
  
Maria grunted her amusement, watching the kitschy tourist traps pass by in the window—mermaids, dolphins, fake fish netting strung across the porches of cheap restaurants. It had been a long time since her last visit to Galveston but she already wanted out of Texas.  
  
“It’s only for a night—until we have your place secure.”  
  
The taxi turned off-road, following the meandering dirt that steadily turned to sand. They left the city behind for a sprouting forest of dunes and dry dune-grass. They eventually pulled up to a small house on four foot stilts. It was yellow and wind-blasted, almost submerged by the piling up sand on all sides and the barrier of sargassum blocking the easy path to the sea.  
  
“Home sweet home,” Fury said.  
  
~  
  
Carol sat on the stairs of the front porch, listening intently to the sound of Talos making lunch and Maria helping Monica to a nap. Monica had so far only managed to stay awake for fifteen minutes at a time before collapsing. While Teresa had assured her multiple times that this was perfectly natural and that Monica was going to fully recover from her ordeal, Carol still itched with anxiety.  
  
In this condition, half-bodied and half-insane, Carol’s hearing was impeccable. Her sight was almost blindingly clear. She could see Maria walking towards the door at her back, hear the hesitation and the anger and the stiffness in her legs. Before Maria had fully stepped back outside, Carol had jumped to her feet and tripped a couple more steps down from the front door, turning to keep all of Maria’s moves predictable.  
  
“Monica’s sleeping again,” Maria said.  
  
“That’s good,” Carol replied.  
  
Maria stepped closer to her, hand coming up to the railing. Carol had visions of racing back up the steps and laying her forehead on meaty part of Maria's palm, brushing the pad's of Maria's fingers with lips.  
  
Carol stepped back, her feet hitting the sand.  
  
Maria paused and then said, “You’re not wearing any shoes.”  
  
“Shoes are hard,” Carol said, syllables knocking against her teeth. “My fingers and toes—most fragile bits.”  
  
“Like me?” Maria asked, sitting down on the top step and making no further effort to close the safe distance between them. She touched the bandages on her hands, still bleeding a mixture of human red and greenish-yellowish light.  
  
“We’re very similar, now,” Carol said, trying for levity. “You could probably arm wrestle me now and win.”  
  
Maria noticed the levity and dismissed it. Carol could feel herself peeling away under Maria’s thoughtful and curious scrutiny.  
  
“I could fuck you against a wall for hours,” she said, plainly but not innocently.  
  
Carol took another step back, desperate to run away so the pain would lessen and she wouldn’t be tempted to rip her own arteries out.  
  
“You’re a fucking heart-breaker,” Carol replied, staying light, voice croaky and smiling.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Maria said, quick enough to barely move her mouth. Her eyes were shimmering green again, the whites as dank as marsh foliage. It faded after a moment, leaving a wistful frown behind on Maria’s face.  
  
“I know,” Carol said.  
  
Talos came out, interrupting their silent and longing regard for the other, hands full with two giant bowls of potato salad.  
  
“I think I accidentally made too much,” Talos said, exaggerating his regret.  
  
“You’re such a liar,” Carol said, amused.  
  
“How dare you accuse me of subterfuge,” Talos replied mildly, handing off one bowl to Maria and walking down the steps to Carol. “I would never.”  
  
“Weren’t you a spy?” Maria asked, mouth already full.  
  
“Bond, James Bond,” Talos said, his face morphing briefly into Sean Connery.  
  
~  
  
Monica woke to a uniquely beach susurrus dappling the night air. Her mother lay on the bed beside her, deeply asleep, Bripteth on her other side, her small hand resting near Monica’s shoulder. Monica carefully levered herself over Bripteth and to the floor. Glancing around the one room cottage, Monica saw Talos snoring on the couch and her Auntie curled up tightly on the lazy-boy, splintering off small and quickly dissolving beams of lavender light, twitching with pain in her slumber.  
  
Monica teared up but knew better than to wake her. Or to touch her.  
  
When Monica had first awoken, after the frantic flight to nowhere, she had found herself on the beach. Circling above her were helicopters framed with strange fireworks. She had pushed herself out of a cradle of soft sand and saw her mom lying in the tide, bleeding, while Auntie Carol dragged herself out of the water. Monica had tried to scream, but she had no air. She had tried to stumble down to the surf from her safe dune, but the path to both her mothers stretched long and turned a slippery silver the further she attempted to run.  
  
Auntie Carol was also bleeding, but not normally. Her whole body looked like it was burning, like the hottest part of the flame—intense and sharp. Her mom’s body was dissolving on the sand and in the water, a vibrant green energy melting from her skin—the tips of her fingers and toes. Neither of them had any hair and Auntie’s head looked seconds away from cracking in two.  
  
“Maria! Maria, hon, please, just breathe, please,” Auntie was sobbing, dropping to her knees and reaching for Maria.  
  
As Auntie touched Maria, the silvery sand Monica was slipping on gave way and suddenly the barren gulf shore was bursting with the brightest of smells and textures: the colorful muscles Monica used to chase after when she was little popped up under her feet, littering her way with their colorful shells, like river pebbles. The sargassum scattered across the sand was illuminated, shedding its dusty and dried out husk for a fresh bloom. The sky sparkled with green stars, and the air with green lightning bugs and emerald dragonflies.  
  
Carol and Maria were huddled inside a golden fog and through it Monica could see her mother’s body solidifying, her many cuts healing, her hair growing ever so slowly, her life gathering back into one place, one source. The fog collapsed inside itself and Maria lay alive on the sand, choking up sea water, and Auntie Carol was gone.  
  
The next thing Monica remembered was shooting awake from a clean bed in a white room, screaming for her Auntie.  
  
“Hey, Monica, sweetie, Monica I’m right here,” Carol said to her, standing at the foot of her bed. She was clean and bruised, shaking and emanating an ugly violet halo. When Monica had tried to leap into her arms, her Auntie had fallen backwards, screaming, “ _No_ —don’t touch me!”  
  
And that had almost been the worst of it.  
  
For Monica, the worst part had been her descent from the upper atmosphere. Not because she was falling. Because she was breathing. Because the chute above her was floating through storm clouds and heavy wind without care. Because she was breathing and with each breath, she was carried perfectly on tame gusts. Because she was breathing and her breathing carried her to sleep and to rest on the soothing sands of the most feathery dune. It scared her, the volume of her own breath.  
  
Fortunately, it was easy to forget this fear in the face of the terror of and for her parents.  
  
Monica climbed out the beach house’s open window, not wanting to risk the squeaking of the front door, and landed on the porch without a sound. She remembered her beach trips, before Auntie had been lost, and part of her was thrilled to be back on a semi-vacation in Galveston. She scrambled down the driveway and ran towards the sound of the waves. She could taste which direction the ocean lay.  
  
The anticipation of seeing the gulf broke open as she nearly rolled down the last dune to the shore. The dark waters were darker than she remembered from those long-ago camping trips, the moon starker in the blue night, and the moon’s reflection shined crisper on the wet sand, teasing as always when Monica chased it.  
  
Monica had never had this much energy twisting around in her body. Not even the nerves before a relay race—with all the swimmers pulling on their goggles, straightening their caps, and climbing limber and warm onto the diving block—not even that could compete with the present spirit in Monica’s flighty arms and legs. She knew it wasn’t going to last, that in about an ten minutes she was going to fall asleep without her own permission, but for now, she needed to run.  
  
She raced after the moon in the sand, first sprinting with light and quick steps, but then taking great leaps to try and surprise the silvery reflection. She knew there was no chance of ever catching it, standing on the moon, feeling that light filtering between her toes, soaking into her skin while her feet got trapped in the wet sand—but she yearned for it and some light being centered in her mind felt that was enough.  
  
“Monica!”  
  
Bripteth’s call wasn’t loud but Monica heard her like Bripteth was whispering in her ear. She turned and raced back, chasing after the sheen of moonlight on Bripteth’s concerned face rather than the light in the watery earth.  
  
“Heya, Bri,” Monica said, chest heaving.  
  
“You shouldn’t be out here, alone, you know,” Bri said, trying and failing to sound stern.  
  
“I’m not out here alone,” Monica replied cheekily, digging her toes into the sand.  
  
Bri rolled her eyes (a gesture Monica had spent several hours last winter teaching her) and said, “Well, I’m not carrying you back to bed if you faint again.”  
  
“What, aren’t you strong enough?”

“Yes,” Bri said haughtily. “But I refuse.”  
  
Monica giggled and said, “I wanted to sleep out here anyway. Too cramped in that house.”  
  
“We’re leaving tomorrow morning,” Bri reminded her.  
  
“I know, but still…”  
  
Bri didn’t say anything, waiting for Monica to express something that Monica simply didn’t know how to express.  
  
“Fine,” Bripteth finally sighed. “Wait here.” She ran off, quick and graceful, up the boardwalk Monica had ignored in her haste to get to the beach.  
  
Monica followed after her several yards before picking a place in the dry sand beyond the tide-lines and settling down. Bri returned with a bundle of blankets just as Monica started to feel the weariness setting in.  
  
“You know,” Bri said as Monica squirmed around, molding the sand beneath to her body. “I remember what it was like. To start mimicking.”

“I don’t think this is mimicking, Bri,” Monica muttered.  
  
“It is, though, my dad said,” Bri retorted.  
  
“It’s different.”  
  
“Duh.”  
  
Monica glared at Bri who was still sitting up, surveying the stars, hints of sadness hanging off the lines of her mouth, a lost expression in her hands.  
  
“It’s difficult,” Bri continued. “It hurts. It feels like you don’t belong to you anymore.”  
  
Monica reached out grabbed one of Bripteth’s hands, linking their fingers.  
  
“But you are you, really,” Bri said, looking down at Monica before falling back onto the blanket herself. “If you need help—I can help.”  
  
“Thank, Bri,” Monica said, awkward and tired. “Ditto.”  
  
~  
  
Fury had them escorted back to Louisiana in another discrete bullet proof car. Monica slept against Maria’s shoulder most of the way, Bripteth on Monica’s, in the back seat. Talos napped occasionally on Fury’s shoulder up front, in between fits of fiddling with the radio, while Fury pretended not to enjoy it. Carol found another way home.  
  
“What’s this?” Talos asked, a tinny Wynona Judd belting out of the speakers as they drew into town. “I like her.”  
  
“Now there’s a surprise,” Fury said while the agent next to him struggled to control his smirk.  
  
“She’s fierce,” Talos said.  
  
“That’s one way of putting it,” Fury said. “Coulson, keep your thoughts to yourself.”  
  
“Just not a fan of country music, sir,” Coulson replied, straight-faced.  
  
“Says the man with one too many Nirvana shirts,” Fury said.  
  
“What’s wrong with Nirvana?”  
  
“Whiny white-boy music.”  
  
“So is country!”  
  
“Yeah,” Maria agreed, leaning forward over the front seat. “Whining about poverty and the nature of mortality.”  
  
“Jesus, don’t get her started,” Fury groaned.  
  
“I still like Nirvana,” Coulson said, small and petulant. “Danvers likes Nirvana."  
  
“No she doesn’t,” Maria said. “She likes PJ Harvey. Two different worlds, man.”  
  
“I like Mariah Carey,” Monica said in her sleep.  
  
“Don’t we all,” Fury nodded soberly.  
  
~  
  
Maria’s dreams that night, the first night back in Louisiana, were empty. Or rather she was empty as she dreamed them. She was hollow and they were a verdant oblivion.  
  
She walked slowly on the surface of a crystal orb, pinpricks of gold flickering in the space around her body.  
  
Below her feet was a breadth of unflappable desert sky. Cloudless and twinkling with the chirps of crickets and owls and stars shifting from one horizon to the other, blessing the dry rusty rocks, benevolent and unequivocal. Her feet morphed into the red stone and ancient microbial dust, warm from the sun and cool from a thousand others. With each step, a canyon unclasped its hands and raised them to heaven, praising the river that made them.  
  
The desert ocean, the beautiful nihility, deep and dangerous, did not try to tempt her further. Maria could not be tempted on this strange starlit walk.  
  
Instead, her stone feet rumbled across a million different landscapes. Primordial geysers, spouting gas and mud, boreal forests poking through the ribbon of their very own aurora, pitch black sea trenches, a jungle canopy. Maria could not discern each one, could not pick them apart as they twirled past her in emerald flashes—each image pretending to be both the last and the one coming after. It was Earth, teasing her with a life lived, achieved equilibrium gifting it a brief respite from the void.  
  
Her stone feet were rhythmic—a 2/4 beat—syncopated—heavy—  
  
The Earth crumbled away into a fine green dust and as it settled on the margins of Maria’s dreams, a blue world melted into view. The room was molded out of dripping wet royal navy, turquoise, cerulean, and right in the center, on a sapphire stage, was the matte blue singer and her fiddle.  
  
She played a mellow shuffle-rhythm, back and forth, push and pull, the rosin dust crunchy in the air and on her strings. Over the rhythm she sang, piercing the humble chords with more blue, and more blue, and more. The singer drove up the tension until the walls started to dissolve, then she resolved the color, and the dripping clay resolved itself back to structure.  
  
“Nicole?” Maria asked from her seat in the audience, making no sound for she was blue, too.  
  
The singer was Nicole but not. She was playing a fiddle, she was playing a guitar, a banjo, a very old instrument that looked like a banjo. She was singing words that seemed to land in the room like they carried with them the weight of their own philological history.  
  
The green flashes sustained their pattern above Maria as she sat and rested in the old bar and listened to the familiar and indescribable music. She realized it wasn’t an orb she had been walking on, but a long asphalt road, now a gray strip across a verdant green sky-way. The music in the room was generously piling blue stone after blue stone underneath the road's white and yellow painted traffic lines. Maria decided to help, collecting the scattered blue notes from the ground and tossing them through the open ceiling. With each stone she tossed, she left a shimmer of green ivy behind, climbing the thick air in the bar, lighting up the heat of it, the despair of it—revealing the joy, the celebration of the music, a happiness that ripped up the singers voice and gave Maria the strength to walk on.  
  
The road was open and free. Where would she go? When?  
  
She stood on a porch off the shoulder of the road. Between the banister and roof stretched a perfect spider web housing a spider as long as her hand.  
  
“What am I, now?” Maria asked the spider. “What kind of creature has been made of me?”  
  
The spider didn’t answer.  
  
~  
  
Carol scrambled for the phone, tipping over her coffee onto her jeans and cursing.  
  
“Hello, Rambeau residence?” she tried to say politely, knowing she would never manage, especially not at three am.  
  
“Hello, dear,” Addie’s voice said on the other end, also failing to be appropriately courteous. “Did I wake you?”  
  
“No, ma’am,” Carol said, dropping back onto the couch, rubbing at the coffee splatter on her pants. “Couldn’t sleep.”  
  
“Hmmm, I suppose you don’t have any idea where Maria might be?”  
  
Carol inhaled quickly and choked on her own saliva.  
  
“Asleep in her bed, last I checked,” Carol said warily hoisting herself up again and inching as close to the stairs as she could with the phone cord pulled taut.  
  
“And when was that?”  
  
Carol mustered up as much embedded shame as she could but even still she didn’t hesitate to say, “Five minutes ago.”  
  
“Ah.”  
  
“Ten minute intervals, if you must know.”  
  
“I didn’t ask, dear. And I would say you should talk to someone about paranoid delusions,” Carol pinched the bridge of her nose, “because it simply isn’t safe for a child to be exposed to that sort of…”

A sharp pause.  
  
“Crazy,” Carol supplied tonelessly.  
  
“Batshit nonsense, I was thinking.”  
  
“And saying, apparently.”  
  
“You provoked me.”  
  
“Is there a point to this late night chat? Other than reminding me that I’m not human enough for your granddaughter?”  
  
“It _seems_ like they’re just as human as you are, now,” Addie said, both lofty and scathing.  
  
“Can’t exactly blame me for that one.”  
  
“Well someone’s to blame for the fact that your fiancé is standing in my yard glowing green like a neon sign in Vegas.”  
  
“She’s _what_?”  
  
Carol heard a screen door opening and Addie’s voice, mouth apparently lifted from the receiver, shouting, “Hon, what are you doing to that tree?”  
  
“Addie, what is going on?” Carol demanded.  
  
The screen door shut on the other end and Addie said, “Maria is either communing with a tree or trying to set it on fire. It’s really difficult to tell at this distance. She also doesn’t appear capable of hearing.”  
  
“Jesus _Christ_.”  
  
Carol hung up the phone before Addie could finish her “Lord’s name” admonishment, racing upstairs to check on Monica and Bripteth. They were sound asleep, Monica having moved to the floor next to Bri, illuminated by a dragonfly-night-light behind Monica’s bookshelf. Satisfied, Carol reversed back over the landing to Maria’s room (their room). She found a glimmering residue of green light, like pixie dust, dispersed over the indent in Maria’s bed and the floor leading to the open window.  
  
“ _Jesus Christ_.” She said again, sprinting for the door.  
  
~  
  
The road leading to Addie’s was barely paved. Carol wanted to beam there, like light, instantaneously. But she also didn’t want to set fire to the drier grass and moss hanging around in the midst of a summer dry-spell. She contented herself with running barefoot on the gravel, roasting the asphalt back to near liquid form.  
  
Addie was waiting for her in the front yard with a flashlight in the pocket of her housecoat. She was tapping a slipper-ed foot as Carol materialized in front of her with a blast of heat.  
  
“Took your sweet time,” Addie said, turning on her heel and marching to the edge of her garden. She slid her feet out of her slippers and pushed them into the rain-boots piled at the end of her porch stairs. She hoisted her nightgown up slightly and then led Carol around the house to the back, where the creek ran dangerously close and frequently flooded her lawn. She swung the flashlight beam across the grass and stomped loudly, warning off the gators and snakes.  
  
Before Carol could demand for Maria to appear, Addie swung her flashlight up and pointed with the light to a figure standing ankle deep on the silty slippery bank, nearly hidden by the pond grass and moss dangling over the water.  
  
Carol shot forward recklessly pausing only when the dry dirt between her toes turned to mud.  
  
Maria was glowing, but not like a neon sign in Vegas. She luminesced like the bundles of algae on cold sea shores, like the life trapped in the frozen world of glaciers in the arctic. She was green, lively, like summer leaves munching on sunlight and projecting the sun’s image on the earth beneath them. Her feet were submerged and in the shallow water Carol could see them turning to pond scum at the edges, taking root like the elms protecting the waterways of the bayou. As Carol inched around, for some reason terrified of startling her, she took note of Maria’s eyes—normally so rich and brown and expressive—swallowed up in that golden and olive light. She was lost in something beyond the creek and dark marsh around them.  
  
“It’s no use calling to her,” Addie said, following Carol’s path, flashlight dimmed at her hip. “She won’t respond.”  
  
“How did she get here?” Carol asked, moving into the water, hoping to catch Maria’s gaze.  
  
“Not sure,” Addie said. “I was in bed fast asleep—then I hear someone opening the gate. I thought it was Tom, drunk and missing his own house by a mile, again, but then I see her, all shiny and calm, just floating past the window.”  
  
“Floating?”  
  
“Oh, she was walking, leaving strange sparkly footsteps so of course she was walking, but for the life of me I couldn’t see her legs moving,” Addie replied. Carol detected the hint of worry and alarm in her voice but kept up the questions anyway.  
  
“And how long’s she been like this?”  
  
“‘Bout an hour,” Addie said.  
  
Carol pivoted on the spot, glowering up at Addie’s unbothered face.  
  
“Yes?” Addie asked, raising her eyebrows.  
  
“It took you a _whole hour_ to call me?” Carol said, shrill, throwing her arms out.  
  
“ _You_ were the one checking on her every ten minutes like a crazy person,” Addie said, hands on her hips. “How come _you_ didn’t notice she was gone?”  
  
“Because she wasn’t gone!” Carol defended. “I fucking saw her there, sleeping, since eleven, in her bed. She was there.”  
  
“Well, she can’t be in two places at once, dear,” Addie said.  
  
“No one can,” Carol muttered to herself, unsure and fixing her glare back on Maria.  
  
“You must have seen something like this on your travels,” Addie replied anyway. “This is alien magic and you are an alien, if I’ve ever seen one.”  
  
“You _have_ seen an actual alien, Addie,” Carol said, still focusing on the glowing woman before her. “And look, if she was in two places at once, we all would’ve felt it, ok? She would’ve had to bend spacetime to her will to manage it. Even I can’t do that—and I can literally go the speed of light.”  
  
“Well maybe exploding affected her differently,” Addie said. “You said yourself today that we don’t know how this affected them. Only that it did.” She pointed aggressively at Maria.  
  
Carol did in fact remember telling a very distressed and angry Addie that, right before Addie had reached for her face to hold it still while Addie gave a very stern Addie-lecture, and Carol had panicked so hard she broke a window trying to flee. Upon learning that Addie had nearly gotten both of them blown up, she was not appeased with by the state of her family or the window.  
  
Carol opened her mouth to argue back, but the sound of another visitor from the front yard had her lifting her fists and lighting them. Addie whipped around, holding the flashlight like a handgun.  
  
“Reveal yourself, intruder!” she shouted.  
  
“It’s me, Ms. Adelaide,” Talos shouted, bending under a low live oak branch and walking into the beam of Addie’s light. “Just looking for Carol.”  
  
Carol released the hold on her power and let her fists drop.  
  
“How did you know I was here?” she called as he approached.  
  
“Saw the light from the office window,” he said, sheepishly.  
  
“Is Nicholas here, too?” Addie asked, craning her neck eagerly.  
  
“No, ma’am,” Talos said, smiling fondly. “He’s still asleep.”  
  
“As we all should be,” Addie agreed solemnly, like Fury was the wisest man on earth.  
  
“I suppose the reason that we aren’t is standing right here?” Talos ventured, stepping closer to the edge of the bank and plunging into the silt at Maria’s side.  
  
“She can’t hear us,” Addie said, evidently assuming the picture Maria made, standing like a lantern in the water, was explanation enough.  
  
“This is certainly a new development,” Talos said. “I thought that she would be like you, Carol. Her hands were glowing like yours do.”  
  
“You know anyone who can time travel, Mr. Talos?” Addie asked, cutting into his musing.  
  
“No, because it's impossible, Ms. Addie,” Talos said.  
  
“How about be in two places at once?”  
  
Talos paused in his survey of Maria, leaning around her bright shoulders and giving an anxious Carol and frustrated Addie a baffled look.  
  
“Is that what she did?” he asked.  
  
“Based on the evidence,” Carol said.  
  
“Specious evidence,” Addie commented.  
  
“Specious?” Talos asked, eyes flicking from Carol and then up to Addie.  
  
“Addie thinks I’m crazy,” Carol explained.  
  
“She is crazy,” Addie said.  
  
Talos shook his head and turned back to Maria. He raised a single finger to touch her arm but just as his finger was about to make contact, a vine, made up entirely of viridian and golden light, burst from Maria’s skin, thorny and ice-cold, steaming in the hot air. It snapped at Talos’s careful finger and he flinched back, holding his hand to his chest.  
  
“Huh.” All three of them said at once.  
  
Addie broke the befuddled silence.  
  
“Well if she ain’t responding to my shouting,” Addie started. “And she ain’t responding to touch, how are we supposed to wake her up?”  
  
Talos shrugged and said, “We don’t?”  
  
Addie nodded, swallowing loudly but accepting his answer.  
  
“Well let’s get inside,” she said quietly. “I’m gettin’ eatin’ alive by these damn mosquitoes.”  
  
Carol stayed put while Addie led Talos back to the house. She didn’t have the sort of blood to tempt mosquitoes anyway. She climbed up out of the creek and found a spot on the grass to give her the best angle of Maria. She settled in to wait.  
  
~  
  
 Maria opened her eyes to pure gold. The oak leaves and marsh grass bathed in it, the sun unloaded it into the water holding steady to her ankles, and the creek drove it west, beyond the many curves of the swamp.  
  
“What’s the story, morning glory?” asked a doleful loving voice. Maria asked the water to let go of her feet and turned around in the creek. There, sitting cross-legged on a small incline above the creek-bed was more gold, more precious, more sweet. Maria opened her arms, stepping forward into the moment on the grass to embrace her treasure, staying back in the water so she could hold her treasure with her, nourish her like Maria was nourished in the nitrogen rich sediment engulfing her toes.  
  
The second before she could touch her, her Carol, she hesitated, taking in Carol’s wide-eyed confusion and fear, taking note of how Carol could not see one Maria, but was insisting on seeing two—  
  
“Maria—”  
  
Maria reached out to her and Carol clambered back, gracelessly crawling backwards in a blink.  
  
“Maria, _don’t_!” Carol shouted.  
  
Maria opened her eyes. She saw Carol above her, terrified and quivering in the grass. She saw Addie and Talos come running up, both equally worried and in awe.  
  
She looked down at herself, at a lingering green glow on her skin, at the strange roots dissolving into the water around her ankles, at the sprinkle of grass on her feet, like she had walked bare and wet-footed across the lawn, grass that shouldn’t be there while standing, rooted, in the creek.  
  
“What happened?” she whispered to the world at large.  
  
~  
  
“All in all,” Fury said, shoveling a whole crepe into his mouth. “Sleepwalking ain’t so bad.”  
  
“That’s what I’ve been saying this whole goddamn time,” Maria said smoothly, adding a fifth spoonful of powdered sugar onto her own crepe and not bothering to add how she essentially sleepwalked away from her own sleeping body. Everyone was well aware.  
  
“I mean,” Fury continued, grinning when Talos dumped another crepe onto his plate wordlessly. “That it wouldn’t be so bad if that’s all it was. Which, well, I'm not completely convinced there ain’t some other shit going on. Considering.”  
  
“Considering _what_ , Nick?” Carol groaned, who at this point was just eating the batter straight out of the bowl with a ladle. “Can you maybe not be a mysterious fucker so early in the morning?”  
  
“Language,” Addie said mildly from her stool by the stove, proudly eyeing Talos’s progress with crepe flipping.  
  
“Kids are upstairs,” Carol said, her voice echoing strangely against the walls of her metal mixing bowl.  
  
“Considering what, Nicholas?” Talos asked, dripping another portion of batter onto his pan.  
  
“Considering people might know about y’all, now,” he said. “Not just Carol. But Maria and Monica.”  
  
“How the hell would they know about Monica?” Maria said, dropping her fork and slamming her hands onto the table. “Whoever ‘they’ are?”  
  
“‘They’ being anyone who is trained to notice when things with certain radioactive signatures go exploding in the atmosphere of a previously categorized ‘harmless’ planet—an explosion, by the way, that scared off some of the baddest bad guys in this quadrant of the galaxy,” Fury said.  
  
“Look at you,” Carol mumbled around her spoon. “Sounding like a real intergalactic spy now. Saying things like ‘quadrant’ and ‘radioactive.’”  
  
“I hate you,” Fury said casually. “Hey, Talos, my man, anymore flapjacks coming?”  
  
“I believe they are called _crepes_ ,” Talos said, pronouncing the word with perfect French.

“I _believe_ you all woke me up at the ass-crack of dawn, panicking like a herd of gazelles, and dealing with that sort of panic works up an appetite,” Fury replied, gesturing with his fork.  
  
“I never panic,” Talos said.  
  
“Can we focus?” Maria asked. “Can we focus on how ‘they’ know about Monica? Like, what, for instance, do they know?”  
  
“No one knows about Monica,” Carol said. "Fury's brain is all messed up from his time in the CIA."  
  
Maria gripped the edge of the table, ignoring the strange groaning sound it made.  
  
“They only know something happened similar to what happened two years ago,” Carol went on, same muted tone. “They only know that there was me and a pilot. Fury’s an idiot. No one could possibly know Monica was involved.”  
  
“Well,” Fury said. “Except those who wanted to use her to get you in the first place. They did their research.”  
  
“They’re wizards,” Carol said. “They didn’t need to do research.”  
  
“Are we in danger?” Addie asked. “Are we on lock down, again? If so, I need to call Eva, tell her I can’t water her plants while she’s at Eli’s wedding.”  
  
“Carol is causing ripples,” Talos said. “My sister has been keeping track of any moves or plans made against Terra. They’re growing.”  
  
“Naturally,” Addie said.  
  
“They’ve apparently been on a steady rise since WWII,” Fury said. “Something about that HYDRA weapon the Nazis got a hold of. Point is, though, that people think Carol is that weapon.”  
  
“Not a weapon,” Carol and Maria both said, dutifully.  
  
“Yes, I know, I’m a humanitarian, not calling you a weapon, everyone knows this,” Fury said. “But _that_ weapon went missing. Probably buried with Steve Rogers. And Carol’s power is hard to explain so people are assuming she is _it_ , or that she has access to it.”  
  
“Hang on,” Talos said, placing his pan and spatula in the sink and turning to thoughtfully contemplate the whole kitchen. “Carol absorbed the power of Dr. Lawson’s core. What did Maria and Monica absorb?”  
  
“Carol exploding, I thought,” Addie said, moving from her stool the table and settling down with the whole pot of coffee.  
  
“No,” Carol said, distantly. “No I exploded after they had already broke out of his hold—Maria had even turned off the engine—,”  
  
“What’s that have to do with anything?” Fury asked.  
  
“He paused the plane,” Carol said, looking into her bowl, vision trapped in her head. “He arrested its kinetic energy but found a way to release the potential energy—kept the plane in a stasis.”  
  
“It felt like he had frozen it in midair,” Maria said. “But the engine was still going. So I turned it off. Figured we’d start falling eventually.”  
  
“I need to call my science guy,” Talos said frowning.  
  
“What if,” Carol said, looking up finally from her batter, meeting Maria’s gaze for the first time in hours. “What if you didn’t just absorb the core, like me? What if you adapted rapidly because of the core—but also you were radiated by the energy of the entire moment he paused?”  
  
“He didn't pause a moment. He couldn't have. It’s impossible to manipulate time without manipulating gravity--” Maria cut herself off, her own words from moments before echoing in her head, _the engine was still going, so I turned it off, figured we'd start falling eventually..._  
  
Carol ground her jaw, scanning Maria’s face. For the space of a breath, it was just her and Carol in the room. Maria’s peripherals dissolved into the golden-green pinpricks from her dream and as she looked at Carol, eating crepe batter out of a bowl, cross-legged on the island counter, Maria was also looking at Carol who was sitting cross legged on her air force bunk, mending Maria’s trousers, quicker with a needle than Maria ever was, listening to Maria talk about her mother. Maria breathed out, her peripheral vision returned, and Carol was one Carol, despondent yet fierce, in pain but in love.  
  
“Your eyes were glowing again, hon,” Addie said.  
  
“I know,” Maria said, her own voice coming to her ears from miles away, across a dark chasm. “It, I think, it might have to do with time.”

"You're not traveling in it," Talos said. "So what are doing with it?"

"Same thing gravity does," Maria said. "Bending it."

~  
  
 _It happens when I bend time_ , Maria says somberly but irreverently to a sturdy sun-dial stone.  
  
 _When I bend time_ , Maria says to the night sky after running from home, a sky clear and full of stars, free from Houston’s city lights.  
  
 _I bend time_ , Maria says to Carol when she leans in for a kiss.  
  
~  
  
Carol said nothing but held Maria’s scared and wondrous gaze up with her unwavering and unblinking regard.  
  
“Let’s add more to that dire note,” Fury said. “People think the core is Carol and Carol is this weapon. That puts a significant portion of the western United States in danger.”  
  
“When that Yellowstone Caldera blows, we’re all gonna die, not just the cowboys,” Addie said, pouring herself more of her specialty sludge coffee.  
  
“Yeah, not talking about that--well, it's kind of about that,” Fury said while Talos looked on, alarmed. “Remember where Carol crashed? Coulson informed me yesterday that some of our allies are worried about radioactive footprint. We need to cover it up before we attract anymore unwanted visitors.”  
  
“How are we supposed to cover it up?” Talos asked.

“Don’t look at me,” Addie said. “I taught eighth grade science. Don’t know shit about space-magic.”  
  
“I’ll figure something out,” Carol said, setting aside her bowl and running her hand over her buzz-cut. “It's me, essentially. I'll just re-absorb it or something.”

"That'll be good for your health, sure," Maria muttered to her lap.  
  
“And just how are you supposed to do that when every time you use your powers you start to bleed all over the place?” Fury asked. “This needs to be a discrete mission. We need to fly completely under the radar.”  
  
Carol hopped off the counter and started filling the sink with hot water, saying, “Fury, you really need to stop using the royal 'we' when talking to me. My head’s big enough.”  
  
“You have to travel there _slowly_ , Danvers,” Fury said. “As in, normal human-person speed. In a car.”  
  
“I ain’t driving all the way there,” Carol groaned.  
  
“Why, how far is it?” Talos asked.  
  
“Fucking Idaho,” Carol said.

"Language," Addie said.

"You clearly can't _fly_ all the way there," Fury said. "Unless your plan to prevent some more nuclear explosions was to _be_ one."  
  
“You won’t be driving all the way there,” Maria said.  
  
“Thank you,” Carol said, raising her eyebrows at Fury.  
  
“ _I’ll_ be driving you all the way there,” Maria finished.  
  
Carol dropped the bottle of dish soap in her hand, squinting suspiciously at Maria.  
  
“Oh, will you?” she asked.  
  
“Yes,” Maria said. “You need the help. I can help.”  
  
“I’ll be coming, too,” Fury said. “Whatever is happening with you three needs adult supervision. Obviously Monica should come along, too. She's just as freaky as both of y'all.”  
  
“Ok,” Carol said. “This is getting out of hand.”  
  
“Yes, I think I will join you also,” Talos said. “This is very fascinating. Would love to report it all back to my science guy. Bripteth should come—see more of Terra, keep Monica company.”  
  
“This is already far too much company,” Carol said.  
  
“Alright, no need to twist my arm, I’ll come, too,” Addie said, slugging down the rest of the coffee straight from the pot. "I'll be the keeper of sanity because all of y'all are clearly crazy."  
  
“ _What._ ” Carol said.  
  
“Where are we going?” Monica asked from the doorway. “Oh, did Maw Maw make crepes?”  
  
~  
  
That evening, Fury arrived with a rental van, an ugly yellow VW bus, which Monica immediately proclaimed ‘cute’ and Addie deemed a ‘damn hippie machine.’  
  
Fury, Carol, and Maria were in the dining room, unpacking the giant collection of road maps Carol had gone on an actual frenzy for, several sample packing lists from the camping store two towns over, and a industrial sized bag of trail mix, which Fury had purchased ‘just in case they had to leave in a hurry.’  
  
“What’s it like to be a super spy, Nick, getting all your super-spy gear and super-spy snacks?” Carol asked, picking out the m&m’s from her handful and chucking the peanuts at Fury’s implacable face.  
  
Maria watched them from her chair at the head of the table, trying to focus on the packing lists, but instead finding herself drawn to the buzzed uneven hair-line on Carol’s neck.  
  
“What’s it like to be a freak of nature?” Fury asked, flicking a peanut off the table.  
  
“Better than a government lackey babysitting the freak of nature,” Carol said.

“Actually, I’ve recently been promoted,” Fury said. “Now I get to babysit a whole family of freaks of nature.”  
  
“I’m going to tell Talos you called him that,” Carol said.  
  
Fury’s one eye scowled so hard the rest of his face didn’t have to.  
  
“I was talking about you, your glow-stick wife, and y’alls sleeping beauty daughter, actually,” Fury said.  
  
“Oh, them,” Carol said. “Well in that case I’m obligated to beat you up. For insulting my wife and child and their honor or something.”  
  
“I could take you,” Fury taunted, which was so ludicrous a statement he made himself laugh before he completely finished saying it.  
  
Carol stuck her tongue out.  
  
Maria’s periphery dissolved. Carol stuck her tongue out, drunk and angry, at the douchebag flyboy telling stupid jokes, Carol stuck her tongue out at Monica, making Monica squeal with delight, Carol stuck her tongue out at the back of tall man in a ridiculous red robe. Maria blinked back to the dining room.  
  
“I’m just saying,” Carol said. “That you guys can ride in the bus and Maria and I can find a corvette and meet y’all there.”  
  
“How about just a bunch of motorcycles instead?” Fury asked. “Get the kids a little side-car.”  
  
“Not a bad idea.”  
  
“Or how about the cheapest convertible on the market,” Fury continued.  
  
“As long as it comes with red-listick, sunglasses, and a trucker cap,” Carol replied. Then she added, “Like Thelma and Louise,” at Fury’s puzzled look.  
  
Maria closed her eyes, green shimmering in the darkness, and she sat briefly on the scratchy faux-velvet of a theater seat, struggling to contain her breakdown watching a joint suicide. She opened them again to Carol’s wry grin teasing Fury into laugh—everything so lax, so casual, so normal after the disaster that had ripped through their lives only days before.

"Will this also end in a suicide pact?" Fury asked.

"Nah," Carol said. "Not that I'm against sacrificing myself for a good story. Or looking badass while doing it."  
  
Maria snapped.  
  
She pushed out of her chair, knocking it over, and in a green blur was standing over a slouching Carol who was just realizing her joke hadn’t landed.  
  
“I was kidding,” Carol tried, rolling one shoulder awkwardly.  
  
“What the _fuck_ is wrong with you!” Maria shouted, hands splaying out in front of her, gesturing to the monolith of Carol’s attitude. "You're actually standing here, joking about your own fucking death, like I haven't already lived through it _twice_."  
  
“Maria, I didn’t mean—“  
  
“I don’t care what you didn’t mean, Carol—Don’t ever say—you can’t just—”  
  
“Maria—“  
  
“I’m going for a walk,” Maria muttered, stepping out of Carol’s space and retreating toward the back door.  
  
“No, Maria, stop, let me—”  
  
“Just leave me alone for two minutes, Carol,” Maria growled over her shoulder, shoving through the screen door. “Give me some goddamn space—”  
  
Just as she stepped off the back porch and into the grass she felt an unnatural hot hand land heavily on her shoulder.  
  
“Maria, listen!”  
  
Carol dragged on her shoulder, pushing her up against the house wall, leaving her hand clutching at the fabric of Maria’s collar.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Carol said quietly, from deep in her throat, blinking through the wetness in her eyes.  Her skin was crackling with purple electricity and Maria could see red cracks lining up along invisible capillary lines—like fault lines in the earth. The molten rock was fixing to open up her face and arms. “I wasn’t thinking. Which is not good, I realize, but thinking has gotten progressively harder since—the point is—”  
  
“Carol, let go of me,” Maria interrupted, leveling off the emotion in her voice.  
  
“I’m trying to apologize, Maria,” Carol said, moving even closer. Maria breathed her in, the burnt marshmallow smell, the stormy and colorful scent of Carol, whose skin was sparkling and whose body was combusting.  
  
“Let go, Carol,” Maria insisted.  
  
“You never let me apologize,” Carol hissed, tears still working their way down her cracking cheeks. “You have to let me say sorry when I’m sorry, Maria—that’s how this is supposed to work—“  
  
“Carol—” Maria tried to squirm away, but Carol’s unbalanced energy was igniting her own survival instinct, and the green vines wrapped around Maria’s arms made it hard for Maria to move without risking touching Carol, skin on skin. “You need to step away, _yesterday_ —”  
  
Carol set her jaw, her whole body trembling with pain, and didn’t move. Maria could feel the knuckle of her hand less than a centimeter away from the skin of Maria’s neck and Maria almost threw up with the effort to not lean into Carol’s heat.  
  
“Let go,” Maria begged. “ _Now._ ”  
  
Carol stepped back; the winter of her sudden absence washed over Maria’s mind. She closed her eyes to push the green out of her vision and breathe through Carol’s electricity. They stood together, drowning in the choir of crickets, rebuilding the silence and space between them.  
  
“I _am_ sorry,” Carol said finally, her voice as steady and dry and muted as before.  
  
Maria opened her eyes, watching as Carol slowly backed out of the shade of the house and into the blinding sun. The red and purple sparks on her skin were dimmed, but the red flushing her face and puffy eyes was bright as blood. Maria sank to the ground, leaning her head back against the brick wall, longing for the heat to give way to the rain that was promised.  
  
“I overreacted,” Maria blandly offered. Carol rejected it.  
  
“No you didn’t, you dumbass,” Carol replied, enervated and her head wilting in the sun. “I overreacted. I just, I wish you…”  
  
She drifted off but Maria was able to focus now.  
  
“What do you mean ‘I never let you apologize’?” Maria asked. “What the hell does that mean?”  
  
Carol sighed, folding herself onto the grass beneath her and hunching over to pick at the blades.  
  
“You seem to be under the impression that I don’t feel sorry about being away,” she explained. “Six years is a long time, and an extra year after that before I actually came back. I was gone and I’m sorry for it.”  
  
“Carol,” Maria replied, impatient. “You don’t have to apologize for nearly getting blown up by alien imperialists, losing your memory, and then kidnapped and lied to for six years. That’s the definition of something out of your control.”  
  
“As far as I can tell,” Carol said, her frustration from before still simmering. “The ROE after disappearing on the love of your life and your child are to feel a little fucking remorse about it.”  
  
“Don’t lecture me about guilt, Danvers,” Maria retorted.  
  
“Then don’t lecture me about any of _this_ ,” she waved her hand down her arm, letting the fire ignite gently on her fingers. “I am sorry for dying on you, Maria. Accept my apology, forgive me or don’t, but stop telling me not to apologize.”  
  
“Stop blaming yourself for hurt you didn’t cause!” Maria yelled, leaning forward from the wall and gripping her knees until they bruised.  
  
“Stop just accepting the hurt that happens to you like you deserve it!” Carol shouted back.  
  
“How the hell else was I supposed to handle it?” Maria pleaded. She was crying. “How would you have handled it?”  
  
Carol laughed bitterly, her hand coming up to her mouth to catch it before it poisoned the air.  
  
“You know me,” Carol said, smiling psychotically. “Something would’ve burned down by the time I finished handling it.”  
  
“I do know you,” Maria bit out, mean and untethered. “You would blow yourself up.”  
  
“Better than burying myself alive,” Carol said, her tone icy.  
  
They stared each other down, letting the script of their argument run itself out in their heads, committing none of it to a truth that needed to be spoken. Maria saw the end and dropped down beyond it; Carol followed her lead. Their rage softened into passion into sorrow into contrition. Carol’s tremors smoothed out.  
  
“I guess I forgive you, then,” Maria said, covering her teary eyes with her green fingers. “For being away.”  
  
The verdant light under Maria’s skin and eyelids flickered, and Maria saw through it the morning after Carol first came back, memories restored—how full of grace she was, watching Carol mow the lawn, obnoxiously singing along to Emmylou Harris. The green shuttered close with a blink and there Carol was again, sitting huffily and sadly in their overgrown yard.  
  
Carol nodded, squeezing her hands together as her body finally re-found equilibrium.

“I’m not going anywhere again,” Carol said.  
  
“I still miss you _now_ ,” Maria admitted—unthinkingly—cruelly.  
  
“I’m coming _back_ , then,” Carol promised, before Maria could offer up her own apology, her voice barely making it over rustling wind. “I’m on my way back, now.”

~


	6. Chapter 6

_"Sun is the only pulse that runs by itself. While transiency grasps the rest of us through and through, Helios rides it as a cup across the sky.” - Anne Carson_

 

* * *

 

Teresa grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, so she knew a little about existing in a bifurcated and fluctuating state. She said as much to Captain Marvel, but the woman was intent on not listening. Understandable. When Teresa looked at her, strategically packing a van almost obsessively, she saw a woman vastly outnumbered by her own pain and power. From what she had gathered from Bri and Talos, the galaxy was more demanding than grateful.  
  
That was why Teresa had made a house-call. She had never visited Louisiana, and genuinely felt assaulted by the humidity, but Nick was an old friend (as friendly as S.H.I.E.L.D. agents could get, at least), and it was much easier on the heart to worry about patients in person.  
  
“You still can’t tell us what’s wrong with Monica?” Ms. Adelaide asked, handing her a glass of tea. They were hiding under the shaded porch. Tersea was drenched in bug-spray but Adelaide was simply smacking each mosquito that came close. Maria and Talos were prepping snacks for the first leg of the journey and Teresa was glad she had an excuse not to talk to her. A worried grandma was one thing, a worried mother was another.  
  
“Not necessarily,” Teresa said. “It’s just that there really isn’t much that’s wrong with her. Her body is reacting to the radiation like our bodies react to a healthy does of sun. It was like a vitamin to her.”  
  
“She hasn’t gone all glowy, like Maria or Carol, though,” Adelaide said. “Maybe she wasn’t exposed like they were?”  
  
Teresa wiped the tea from her upper lip and then held the condensing glass to her forehead, warding off the growing ache.  
  
“Don’t tell her this now, ma’am,” Teresa said. “But if she wanted, she could dive to the bottom of the Marianas trench and swim back up all on the same breath. She could stand on Everest, no oxygen, no thermals, and breathe fine and stay warm. She’s not precisely recovering from lethargy. She’s recovering from a body rewriting itself. From what I can tell, the reason she isn’t lighting up like a nuclear reaction, like her mother or Ms. Danvers, is because it’s not done re-writing. Her body, that is.”  
  
“Are you saying it’s possible to be—to be— _infected_ with ‘this’ in a nice and easy way?” Adelaide stuttered.  
  
“I don’t know the possibilities,” Teresa said. “All I know is, you have to keep an eye on them.”  
  
“I already said I would,” Adelaide grumbled, slipping her hand into her own empty glass and pulling out a handful of ice cubes. She ran them down her arms, sighing.  
  
“I trust Nick with a lot of things,” Teresa said. “But knowing the difference between a friend and an ally?” She chuckled, un-amused.  
  
“Is there pressure?” Adelaide asked. “For her to do this? For Carol to take care of this? Nick must have known all he had to do was _mention_ what was happening and she’d be there.”  
  
“There’s always pressure,” Teresa said. “Though what we have to do in the name of security—in the business we don’t call that pressure. We call it duty.”  
  
“Duty?” Adelaide said. “Duty implies humility.”  
  
Teresa nodded before putting her glass down on the grimy surface of Addie’s porch table.  
  
“Thanks for the tea,” Teresa said. “I’m off to Korea. There’s a baby geneticist making waves. I’ll let you know if she can help to understand this.”  
  
She stood up, sending Carol one more calculated look, before turning back to Adelaide.  
  
“Watch out for them,” Teresa said. “They’re both unstable, even if Maria won’t admit it for herself. Any more of that core, that energy…”  
  
“Maybe you people just don’t have enough perspective,” Adelaide said. “They were getting married. They were gonna make a promise to each other and God. Like Abraham and Isaac--I’ll look out for my family. Just as he looked out for his.”  
  
Teresa’s face twisted, struggling to contain a derisive laugh. “Wait,” she said. “Do you mean ‘he’ as in Abraham or ‘He’ as in—”  
  
Adelaide just smiled and shuffled back into the house.  
  
~  
  
Carol stuffed the road maps for Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Idaho and Wyoming in the glove department, one by one. She also had bought California, Missori, Illinois, and Arkansas, just in case, and Maria accused her of being a little too excited about maps—an accusation justified by that fact that Carol had stood over Monica, Bripteth, and Talos, imperiously teaching them how to properly fold one, should the unlikely need ever arise when Carol herself wasn’t available.  
  
For all her enthusiasm, though, navigating was made simpler by the endless stretch of Texas. Three hours into their trip and Carol had yet to even start planning for the highways and farm roads of New Mexico or Oklahoma.  
  
“Where are we?” Monica whined, her cheek mashed against the stained fabric under the van window.  
  
“Just passing south of Hunstville,” Carol muttered, uncapping a highlighter and running it along the ‘scenic route’ taking them between Austin and San Antonio, four to five hours west of their current position.  
  
“And where’s that?” Monica asked.  
  
“Tell you what, Monica,” Maria called back, keeping her eyes out for the turn and mentally cursing the unkempt back-road that was scraping up the bottom of the van. “How about you keep an eye out for them jackalopes.”  
  
“No such thing,” Monica grumbled. “And all I see right now are _trees_.”  
  
“How much longer we gonna be in Texas?” Fury shouted from the back.  
  
“Well, if you let us take the interstates, not much longer,” Maria replied.  
  
“That’s a lie,” Carol said mildly. “If we took the interstates, it’d still be like 12 or something more hours to El Paso. Not that we’re definitely going that route.”  
  
“How horrid,” Talos said, lifting from his concentration on the poker game he was losing to Bripteth.  
  
“ _The sun has risen, the sun has set, and we’re not out of Texas yet_ ,” Maria quoted in an ironic sing-song.  
  
“Aw, fuck off,” Fury snapped, shoving a sleeping bag against the window and pulling off his seatbelt so he could lie down in the back seat.  
  
“Language,” Addie grunted.  
  
~  
  
The pine trees bled away with each well-worn curve on the highway. The occasional prickly pear patch starting popping up underneath the thinner and thinner canopy. Maria opened her window as the afternoon hit, her left arm catching the heat and her right still chilled from the finicky air condition blasting across her shoulder. Carol was curled up on the passenger seat, resting her chin on her knees, eyes wide on the passing landscape, the flat-marsh broadening into hills.  
  
The children were napping in the back seat, Talos and Addie were quietly sharing a walkman, and Fury was glaring at his own walkman, waiting for a communication on his pager, an update about their potential doom. And yet—  
  
For all that there were so many people in the car, Maria felt like a warm wall had dropped surreptitiously—it was her and Carol alone and a long winding road.  
  
The car was humming and the clouds were piling up on each other, reflecting the now rolling earth. The small mountains of the hill country were purple in the distance and as Maria crested over one, her stomach softly dropped, and she was suspended with Carol again, watching the west spin out from under them. The sun warped the air on the asphalt.  
  
“I ever tell you about the summer I tried to build my own guitar?” Maria asked, pitching her voice below the sound of the car.  
  
“No,” Carol replied, not looking away from the dust sparkling on the dashboard.  
  
“Yeah, well, one summer I tried to build a guitar,” Maria said.  
  
After a beat in which Maria slowed the car as they approached a dip in the road, Carol asked, “Did it work?”  
  
“Loaded question,” Maria said. “Are you asking if the guitar worked? Or if the distraction worked?”  
  
Carol huffed lightly, shaking her head.  
  
“You know I’m always literal,” Carol said. “Did the guitar work?”  
  
Maria looked sideways at Carol, only turning her eyes past the rim of her sunglasses. Carol was looking back at her, expectant, the purple energy boiling under her skin abated and cool for now.  
  
“Yeah,” Maria said, quickly moving her eyes back to the road. The old highways and farm-to-markets twisted more with the land rather than diving through it. The twists required a more undivided attention.  
  
“Yeah, it worked okay. It wasn’t a quality instrument, though.”  
  
“How do you even make a guitar?”  
  
“Make a wooden box and put a neck with strings on it, basically,” Maria said.  
  
“I guess I should ask why you felt the need to make one…”  
  
“Never had the patience to learn to play, so I thought making one was the next best step.”  
  
“You think that maybe yours would’ve been better if you _did_ know how to play?”  
  
“Yeah, that’s normally how it works.”  
  
Carol opened her window. The fresh air sent a wave across her face and the car carried with it a new scent of toast and Carol’s preferred deodorant.  
  
“It was because of your grandma, right?” Carol said a few minutes of basking later. “Why you wanted to make one?”  
  
“Kind of,” Maria said. “I’ve told you how strict she was. When you grow up on a houseboat, it’s hard to raise your own grandkid in a big city.”  
  
“She hated jazz, right?”  
  
“Couldn’t even tolerate blues from the seventies,” Maria laughed. “One of her friends dragged us to a honky-tonk one night and she spat in the parking lot on the way back. She and mama were hell-bent on—tradition, they would say.”  
  
“What would you say?”  
  
“More like ‘Not changing,’ maybe. Hellbent on keeping everything exactly as it should be, the way it always was.”  
  
“So you,” Carol frowned. “You made a guitar to prove them wrong? Or to show you learned their lesson?”  
  
“Mostly I did it just to see if I could. But now that I’m thinking about it, no, that’s not why.”  
  
“Take 158 once we’re in College Station,” Carol said, pointing at the road sign indicating the city they were coming up on.  
  
“I guess I just assumed someone else had done it,” Maria said. “Someone else, behind me. Some ancestor or something. I thought some father of mine, some mother of mine, had made a guitar for someone to play. And I couldn’t do or be a lot of things my mom and grandma wanted me to do or be. But I could do that. And of all the things I could’ve built with that scrap metal and cheap wood, I assumed this would be the best.”  
  
Carol didn’t say anything until they reached a stoplight, blinking down their speed as they reached deeper into the rural-urban spread.  
  
“Where is it now?”  
  
“I burned it,” Maria said.

~  
  
“Horse,” Bri said.  
  
“That’s a cow,” Monica said, straining with patience.  
  
“Technically it’s a bull,” Carol said.  
  
“Two horses,” Fury said.  
  
“Damnit—wait, how many do you have now?” Carol asked.  
  
“Twelve.”  
  
“Jesus,” Carol said.  
  
“Lord’s name,” Addie said. “Three horses.”  
  
“Ok, but one of those is definitely a mule,” Carol said.  
  
“You would know, you hick,” Maria said.  
  
“What’s a mule?” Bripteth asked.  
  
“Half-horse, half-donkey,” Talos answered. He had a small children’s book about ranching open on his lap and a tally count on a legal pad balanced on top of that. “They are infertile, apparently. Remarkable.”  
  
“Why the hell is that remarkable?”  
  
“Horse!” Bripteth said, pointing excitedly at another longhorn.  
  
Monica groaned.  
  
“Cow!” she shouted.  
  
“Bull,” Carol corrected again. “It’s got the horns. You know, the long horns.”  
  
She laughed.  
  
“Do you eat the horns?” Talos asked. “They are quite distinctive.”  
  
“Let’s stop for some ribs,” Fury said.  
  
“We have food in the car,” Maria said. “We’re not stopping.”  
  
“Sure, that’s a good point,” Fury said. “But a better one: ribs.”  
  
“Horse!” Carol and Monica said at the same time, pointing at the same horse.  
  
“Hey, I saw it first,” Monica snapped.  
  
“You did not,” Carol said.  
  
“Just because you’re in the front seat,” Monica started.  
  
“Two horses,” Maria said.  
  
“Talos, who’s in the lead?”  
  
“Nicholas,” Talos said. “By two. Monica down by two. Carol down by three. Ms. Adelaide has five. Maria has two. Bripteth has zero. But she has quite a number of cows.”  
  
“Bulls.”  
  
“Horse!” Bripteth shouted.  
  
“Well done, darling!” Talos cheered, marking Bripteth down for one with a flourish. Monica rolled her eyes and crossed her arms.  
  
“How about whoever is in the lead at the next town will decide whether or not we stop?” Fury asked.  
  
“We’re a minute away from the next town,” Maria said. “I sense you’re manipulating the outcome here."  
  
“I don’t make the rules,” Fury said innocently.  
  
“I agree with Nicholas,” Addie said. “The winner shall decide.”  
  
“I want barbecue,” Monica said, perking up.  
  
“This car is going to stink to high heaven if anyone is allowed to eat pork and beans,” Maria said.  
  
“I vote for Fury’s plan,” Carol said.  
  
“Unanimous!” Fury said.  
  
“Not even,” Maria growled.  
  
“Just rounding up.”  
  
“Well,” Addie said, as they crossed the town limits (a small sign read “Population 1,892”). “We’re here. And I want tex-mex. Not barbecue.”  
  
“Too bad you ain’t in the lead,” Fury said.  
  
“Cemetery,” Addie replied, pointing to the plot appearing around the corner, under the spire of the church.  
  
Everyone in the car whined and protested.  
  
“Final tallies,” Talos refereed over the uproar. “Ms. Adelaide: five. Everyone else: zero.”  
  
~  
  
At the restaurant there was a small gum-ball machine full of glittery bouncy balls instead of candy. After dinner, Addie sacrificed several quarters and soon she was challenging Bripteth, Monica, and Talos to a bouncing competition in the parking lot. Carol kept her keen eyes on the balls and rescued any making their way to the street. Fury lounged in the back of the open van, storing the leftovers and feeding Goose.  
  
Maria longed strangely for her own ball to bounce and yet an even stranger sense of odiousness for their mini sport mired her vision. She sat on the curb in front of an empty lot, as far away from the group as possible. From the distance, she filed away the un-called for fear and hate eating through her.  
  
It happened too quickly for anyone but Maria to fully notice. The ball bounced too high, Carol leaped to grab it, her body stretched, and she nearly split in two. With a silent crack, she snapped back together, and a wave of light rippled briefly from her body, dissipating rapidly. Nothing more happened, no one noticed—Carol bent over, gasping.  
  
Maria stood but didn’t move. Bripteth and Monica were still involved in the game and Carol was hiding her pain well. But Maria knew what she was witnessing—she had felt the effects of it on her minutes before. And Carol was panicking.  
  
Verdant light flashed and Maria saw another strip of existence in which she herself had never met this hesitation to comfort the person she loved more than anything. She would run to Carol, touch her fingertips to her face and neck, hold Carol while she gathered her strength. Remembering the gift of being a comfort, of being loved enough to be relied on, Maria couldn’t help but feel that any gesture she made to Carol without touch was hollow and a lie.  
  
Before she could properly scold herself and try to help Carol anyway, Fury ran to Carol’s side. Talos distracted the girls while he guided Carol back inside the restaurant so she could break down briefly in the bathroom. Maria heard him say, “Chill, Danvers, you’re in one piece.”  
  
Within fifteen seconds, the game continued uninterrupted and Maria was left staring at the empty spot where Carol had needed her.  
  
Addie walked over to her, calling out to Talos to watch the children.  
  
“Let’s go sit down in the shade,” Addie said to her, gripping Maria’s elbow and guiding her to a spot several feet away under a pecan tree. “This sun is brutal.”  
  
The sun certainly wasn’t harsh but squinting against the light was giving Maria a headache. Among other things. Addie groaned as she tipped against the tree and Maria leant the small of her back against a jutting root, polished smooth by previous visitors trying to escape a sky too open and bright. In the blue-ish distance, across the drying remains of cattle-trampled fields, Maria could see east, into the country’s overgrown briar-patch.  
  
“So after we’re done with this rescue mission to Idaho,” Addie began.  
  
“We?” Maria asked, surprised out of her shame.  
  
“We all have a part to play, dear,” Addie sniffed.  
  
“You really shouldn’t be exposing yourself to this sort of radiation,” Maria said, a tired concern at this point.  
  
“Don’t lecture me about radiation,” Addie said. “I was against the bomb then and I’m against it now—“  
  
“Amazing that Truman didn’t consult you at the ripe age of twelve.”  
  
“I was eleven.”  
  
“Not the point.”  
  
“No, the point is that I have no intention of sitting on the sidelines while my daughter and my granddaughter are forced to mess with something so dangerous,” Addie said, sweet and authoritatively.  
  
“I ain’t your daughter, Addie,” Maria said, closing her eyes.  
  
“You’re as good as.”  
  
The green flickered ember-like on the dark surface of Maria’s eyelids. Her body gained weight, her bones turned to a heavy crystal; her bare legs started itching as the dry grass under where they sat dampened and grew louder and longer. She opened her eyes to the blades trying to work their way lovingly into her skin.  
  
“I didn’t love him,” Maria whispered. “I couldn’t.”  
  
“What do you take me for?” Addie demanded, matching Maria’s apologetic tone. “You think when I count my blessings, I discriminate?”  
  
Maria shook her head.  
  
“Your problem, dearie,” Addie said. “Is your interrogation methods. You can’t just let things be, can you?”  
  
“That’s all I’ve _been_ doing,” Maria protested. “Ever since Monica— what are you talking about? Can’t let things be? Are you talking about Carol?”  
  
“I have a lot to say about that lunatic,” Addie said. “Unfortunately, her crazy is more or less a net positive, and the last thing I want to be is ungrateful.”  
  
“Careful, Addie, you’re starting to sound fond.”  
  
“Fond?” Addie said. “Don’t try and shame me—we’re talking ‘bout you.”  
  
“Well talk then, Addie,” Maria groaned. “I haven’t got the slightest clue what you’re trying to say here.”  
  
Addie stared her down—the blades of grass had stopped their quest to merge with Maria’s body and the golden world of sunset was drifting peacefully into dusk.  
  
“It’s only June,” Addie finally said. “And it’s already so hot.”  
  
Maria said nothing. Carol was stumbling out of the restaurant with Fury, aiming straight for the car. She looked exhausted. Fury was unclipping his cell phone and walking towards the highway while Talos redirected the girls back to the van before following Fury. They stood together on the loose shoulder of the road, Fury listening intently and Talos watching him patiently.  
  
“They think this mission will kill her,” Addie said.  
  
“I know,” Maria replied, stiff and sad. That was why they were all there, after all. Unspoken but feared enough to be true. Carol was dissolving already. Carol was a weapon, Carol had no real family left and the U.S. Government, the United Nation, S.H.I.E.L.D., and the World Security Council—they were all familiar with prices paid and Carol was a prime candidate for another debt owed, another life as tribute.  
  
“I don’t agree,” Addie said, casually.  
  
Maria stood up rapidly from the grass and paced a few feet away. She wanted to tear her shoes off and run up the road until her feet blistered.  
  
“You know why I stopped going to town for Mass?” Addie asked.  
  
“I assumed you preferred service in French,” Maria said.  
  
“I do,” Addie said. “But I also like a clean church with functioning pews. No, I stopped going because I had a falling out with Father Michael.”  
  
“Good Lord,” Maria mumbled.  
  
“We had a debate and he lost,” Addie said. “And he was quite the sore loser about it.”  
  
“What did y’all debate about?”  
  
“The nature of sacrifice,” Addie said simply. “The nature of pain. I told him, and I’ll tell you, too, because your soul is just ripe with bitterness: you don’t get gratitude from pain.”  
  
Maria crossed her arms and said, “Carol ain’t gonna die in a state of Grace, no matter what you think or try.”  
  
“Stop interrogating your love,” Addie said. “You don’t know better. Neither do I.”  
  
~  
  
They drove through the night. Carol slept hard and deep in the back and Fury sat up front, taking on her navigation role and failing utterly to fold her maps back into their neat rectangles.  
  
“I guess we’re passing north of San Antonio now,” Fury said, frowning at the road signs. “Think we should just aim for El Paso or start heading to Colorado?”  
  
“Doesn’t matter,” Maria said. “Your people said to go slow? Let’s go slow. Making a wrong turn only means we go slower.”  
  
“My people actually want us there as soon as possible,” Fury said. “I explained to them that attracting any sort of attention is a stupid-ass plan and then I chose to ignore it.”  
  
“You called them stupid-ass?”  
  
“I didn’t phrase it like that, exactly,” Fury said. “But one day, I fucking will, if those dumb bastards keep pushing me.”  
  
He yawned.  
  
“Go to sleep, Nick,” Maria said. “How much sleep you gotten in the past week?”  
  
“I could count the hours on one hand,” Fury said. “Luckily, that’s enough for me.”  
  
“You need sleep. You ain’t superhuman, you dumbass,” Maria said.  
  
“Oh and you are?” Fury asked, before covering his mouth up in another yawn.  
  
“Yeah, actually, I am,” Maria said, too tired herself to properly give Fury shit about that comment. “Don’t know if you remember, but I fought off an alien wizard like a week ago.”  
  
“Oh, right,” Fury said. He slouched in the seat. “I guess a nap won’t hurt. You know where you’re going?”  
  
“Better than you,” Maria said.  
  
He laughed softly before glancing back once more at the slumbering car. Then he slouched further down and nodded off within minutes.  
  
Maria was tired but her mind felt alive. While part of her longed for her bed, there were no physical symptoms for it—no slow blinks and no drifting between the two lanes. She felt a sense of relief for the fact that everyone in the car was asleep except her. Everyone she loved most, piled together, trusting her completely with not only their lives but their uninterrupted rest—Maria was almost thrilled by it. Her mind was sharp, so sharp that she was getting distracted by everything the headlights illuminated in her solo light-triangle zooming down the middle-of-nowhere road.  
  
Without thinking too much about it, Maria switched off the brights. And then, feeling unsatisfied, she switched off the lights altogether. She was now alone in the darkness.  
  
She remembered, though, that she wasn’t truly alone, that nocturnal creatures ran freely under the Juniper brush and mesquite trees. She thought hard on what kind of animals she might encounter out in the sea-like darkness flooding the world beyond the paved road. Mountain lions, maybe. Owls, mockingbirds, rattlesnakes. Armadillos.  
  
Without city street lights or the lights on the car, the midnight color started to glow. Maria was able to make out the edges of the highway with ease and the shapes swirling past her window. Everything she laid her eyes on took on a beautiful bio-luminescent lining, including her fingers on the steering wheel.  
  
Under her blinks, a whole other world was growing into focus. The whole color of it was green but Maria still registered it as her own. She saw a new place, floating in the void next to here she drove: that was the road they were on, several miles down, that was an ancient oak they were going to pass, that was the rusting barbed-wire holding in the pasture that Maria recognized as a Ranch they would drive by in approximately five minutes.  
  
The other occasions Maria had felt her body playing with Time, Maria’s common sense consciousness had let something else in her mind take over. But now Maria was fully awake and fully aware. She took note of how heavy she felt, how clearer her sight, how terrified she was of a darkness, a sweet oblivion dancing just out of peripheral sight.  
  
There was the road, now three minutes in her future. There was a tree, and a ranch, and a fence. And now she saw, in between the flashes of the ‘now’ she was currently navigating, an animal who was sharing in the lonely night. Several animals. A family of armadillos was wondering up to the highway, scuttling along in search of better soil to scavenge and burrow under as daylight approached.  
  
Now Maria understood why should could see that road, two minutes and thirty seconds from their instantaneous place and moment. In two minutes and thirty seconds, she would make contact with those armadillos. She would kill them.  
  
Maria eased her foot immediately onto the breaks, breathing hard. She didn’t want to wake the peaceful car but suddenly the thought that she would crack open those shells was so untenable a thought she felt sick with it, she felt desperate against it.  
  
She slowed down as quickly as she could without slamming on the breaks and jolting the car, watching the green-world and night-world merge in her mind. In two minutes, they were one world. A green flash broke through her vision and her second sight vanished just as the car came to a gentle halt.  
  
Still breathing roughly, she quietly opened her door and climbed out of the van. Her feet on the loose gravel produced a soothing crunch with each step as she rounded the car and crouched down on the road.  
  
The armadillos paid no special attention to her as they slipped from one side of the highway to other, all except for one baby who made an innocent investigation of her toes before scurrying off, no doubt to spook the horses grazing a mile off once dawn hit and they needed to find shelter.  
  
Maria looked up at the night sky, at the stars, and slowed down her heartbeat. She felt like she was coming down from the high of flying, like she had just flown a successful mission and someone on base was going to buy her a beer for it.  
  
When she looked down the road, stretching straighter and longer now that they were making their way out of the hill country, she noticed for the first time that the green wasn’t fading. It wasn’t an emerald light illuminating the edges of the world. It was just the earth. And something of the earth was green. And Maria could see it.  
  
She climbed back into the car and surveyed her passengers. Carol’s eyes peeked open, her face still half-smushed against her pillow.  
  
“You okay?” Carol whispered, her voice not carrying from the back seat but her lips easy to read.  
  
Maria nodded. Carol’s eyes fell closed but her smile was pure and verdant. Maria turned back to the wheel, warm and calm.

~

Carol took over the driving at dawn. The hours of a mind unplugged settled decently on her nerves, making everyone in the car just a little more energetic and itchy.  
  
“I want tacos,” Monica said.  
  
“We have food in the car,” Maria said, digging through her backpack for granola bars and apples. “You had tacos last night.”  
  
“I had the tamale plate last night,” Monica said. “Now I want tacos.”  
  
“We need to stop for gas,” Carol said. “Again. Christ, this car has poor mileage.”  
  
“Got a town coming up in about ten minutes,” Maria said.  
  
“Perfect, then we can stop for tacos,” Monica said.  
  
“Might not even have a taco place in this podunk town,” Fury warned.  
  
“It’s Texas,” Addie said. “Of course they have a taco place. There’s probably a taco place attached to the gas station.”  
  
There was a taco place attached to the gas station. Fury lost a merciless game of Nose Goes and was dragged inside by Monica and Bri, who was mimicking a girl she saw at the Tex-Mex place the night before. Addie was scandalized by the halter top and followed them, vowing to protect Bri’s virtue. Talos made a beeline for the tourist-trap gift shop across the street, excited about the prospect of a ten-gallon hat.  
  
Carol hopped out to fill the tank and Maria abandoned her poor attempts at shut-eye to stretch her legs. The air was much drier and sky wider as she took in the weathered roof of the corner store and the dusty cars lining up at the diner next to them.  
  
Carol hooked the pump into the car, absently humming along to the song blaring from a nearby truck’s radio. Maria leaned against the van, breathing in the sour prickly scent of gasoline, enjoying it against her better nature.  
  
“How are you feeling?” Carol asked. Maria sizzled mildly under Carol’s scrutiny and tipped her head back, catching the sunlight on her neck and chest.  
  
“Tired,” Maria said. “You?”  
  
“I’ve been tired for eight years straight,” Carol said. “What were you doing last night?”  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
“Why did we stop?” Carol copied Maria’s position, but kept her attention on Maria rather than submitting to the quiet blue of the sky.  
  
“Armadillos crossing the road.”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
They stood together, soaking in the morning. The truck blasting Ranchera music drove off.  
  
“I know why you can’t stay,” Maria said.  
  
“What?”  
  
“If you can help someone, you should,” Maria continued.  
  
“Oh, we’re talking about this again,” Carol said lightly. “Ask me to stay and I will.”  
  
“I won’t.”  
  
“Awesome,” Carol said. “So now that we’ve re-established the status quo for the millionth time—”  
  
“I could help you, though,” Maria said.  
  
“I won’t ask that of you, either.”  
  
The pump clicked and Carol turned to extract it from the car. Maria traced a green line from the gas, up Carol’s arm, to Carol’s face. With her hair cut short, it seemed so much wider and sweeter. Her lips were chapped and the bags under her eyes were dark, but the green in her, that verdancy that Maria was now able to see, it was deep and bright and reminded Maria that Carol was alive and here and sweaty in the summer day.  
  
“You need a shower,” Maria said. “How did you get so dirty already?”  
  
“Dust is just easier to see on me than on you,” Carol teased. “You’re just as dirty as me.”  
  
Maria grinned and reached out. Carol flinched but instead of dropping her hand, Maria kept going. She flicked a finger, tracing over the line of dirt and grease on Carol’s cheek, her own skin an inch away from Carol’s.  
  
“I swear, you’re like a child sometimes,” Maria said, pointing. “Look at this.”

“Not my fault your were neglecting your car maintenance duties,” Carol said, crossing her arms. Maria turned, leaning her shoulder on the car instead of her back, bringing herself closer to Carol.  
  
“There was nothing wrong with it, I already told you.”  
  
“Safety first, Captain Rambeau. Better to check than not check.”  
  
“I did check, asshole,” Maria said fondly.  
  
Carol laughed, tossing her head back, the sweat on her skin glimmering. “Oh, I’m sorry, I completely forgot about your magical listening powers.”  
  
“Ain’t magic, you philistine,” Maria said. “Just because I _hear_ everything I need to know and _you_ need to see to believe—”  
  
“Oh, this is rich,” Carol said, throwing her arms out like she had just been gravely insulted. “Got a fucking non-believer here calling me out for a lack of faith?”  
  
“I love you,” Maria said, no effort made, to voice it or to keep it from slipping out. Her teasing and pretentious lilt was still coloring her words, her grin still wide and amused—amused by both Carol and her dramatics and their surroundings.  
  
“Love you, too, you goddamn know-it-all,” Carol said, her smile immense and clean.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the long hiatus! planning on getting this finished by the end of the week, promise!
> 
> thank you so much for the encouraging comments--really motivating to get me back to writing this thing :)

“Where are we now?” Talos asked eagerly, tilting his new hat up so he could see further out the window. “We’re technically in the desert, now, yes?”

“Coming up on Fort Stockton in about half an hour,” Carol said. “Three to four hours from El Paso.”

“I don’t think we should go through that big a city,” Fury shoving his head between Carol and Maria in the front seats.  

“I’m already on it,” Maria said. “If we take 285 North at Fort Stockton, we’ll be in New Mexico in a couple hours. Next largest city is Roswell, I think.”

“Roswell?” Carol asked, her voice cracking a little. 

“Yes,” Maria said, squinting at the road. “Something funny?”

“Think we’ll see any aliens?” Carol asked, low and quick. 

Maria considered ignoring her but it was too much. She grinned.

“You’re not funny,” Maria said. “You really ain’t funny.”

Monica collapsed into a fit of giggles while Fury kept his disappointed lips sealed shut.

“That is just undignified,” Addie said while Talos and Bripteth looked on the others in confusion.

“But we’re aliens,” Talos said weakly. 

“We’re taking a cheesy family photo at the Roswell museum,” Carol declared. “Non-negotiable.”

~

“I love how the further west we get, the more reminders of American-perpetrated genocide there are,” Maria commented as they pulled up to a stoplight in Fort Stockton, passing an adobe motel named for the Apaches, with murals of horse-riders peeling away from the walls. 

“Don’t have to go west for those,” Addie said. 

“It’s all blended together in the South, though,” Maria said. “Especially in Louisiana.”

“Why is every small town we pass through nicknamed ‘Historic?’” Fury asked. “We’ve been through at least seven different towns, all claiming to be historic, like it’s unique. Look at this, ‘Historic Fort Stockton.’ What’s so goddamned historic about it?’”

“Only thing it has going for it, probably,” Carol said. 

Maria lost herself a little in the shade of green littering the arid landscape and sparkling on the sign in Town Square, reading sweetly, ‘Welcome to Historic Fort Stockton.’ 

“I can feel it,” Maria said, not entirely sure if she was thinking or speaking out loud. “Something is weird about all these small towns. They taste…interesting.”

“Dear, you’re glowing again,” Addie said. 

Maria closed her eyes and saw the bare bones of every building around them, the dirt pulled up by horses, by ancient travelers. She snapped out it with a quick inhale. 

“Big cites aren't so rooted in tradition,” Maria said. “Dynamic places don’t call themselves historic.”

“It’s not the compliment they think it is, is all I’m saying,” Fury said. 

Forty-minutes outside of the city, they stopped for dinner at a roadside picnic spot. Eighteen-wheelers were starting to line up in the parking lot; the sun was setting, drooping late in the summer day and Maria found herself layering on a light flannel to ward against the springy, dry wind. 

They made quick work of sandwiches, trail mix, and chips. While Talos and Fury cleaned up and packed away the cooler, Carol and Maria taught the girls how to play Spoons with several twigs they found on the ground. Carol sat out, afraid that in the scuffle for the next card or the twigs in the middle, someone would brush against her and set her off, but she stood on the sidelines, cheating for everyone, claiming it was some sort of egalitarian justice. 

Maria lost, throwing a couple rounds and glaring Carol into silence about it, and as penance, Monica demanded that Maria let her drive around the parking lot. Maria relented far too quickly by her own estimation, but Carol stood in front of the van, hands spread to keep anything unexpected from happening, and Monica managed not to run her over as she tried to shift gears. 

Somehow, when she asked if she could try driving on the highway, Monica was shocked and appalled when Maria said ‘No.’ 

“Auntie Carol?” Monica pleaded, doe-eyed and innocent. 

Carol just laughed and said, “I think I’ve been in enough explosive accidents to last a lifetime.”

Monica, highly offended, took twenty extra minutes to brush her teeth in the public restrooms, finding it difficult to rant at Bripteth about her overbearing parents and brush at the same time.

~

Carol needed a nap, so she let Maria volunteer to drive the night thru. Carol also needed to keep a watch over Maria, growing warier by the second at Maria’s continued neon light-show at random time-bending moments, so she struggled to find a comfortable spot on the front seat rather than stretching out in the back. 

The car fell silent quicker than the night before, everyone more easily soothed by the hum of wheels on road, finding coziness in the cramped and packed car. 

Carol dozed lightly while the world quieted down, but every time she opened her eyes, she caught sight of Maria, sunglasses off in the night, her bare shoulders shining in the starlight, and her warm dark eyes reflecting the car’s headlights back onto the road. It was a difficult thing to ignore. 

Eventually she gave up on sleep and sat upright in the chair, curling her legs under her and laying her sleepy attention on Maria. She didn’t say anything and neither did Maria, but the knotted way Maria sat eased the longer Carol watched her and the smile Carol had spent all day trying to tease out was pestering at Maria’s lips. 

Satisfied, Carol twisted down in the seat and pushed her feet onto the dashboard. They were filthy. She still hadn’t worked her way into wearing shoes. She felt like a Hobbit. 

“What’s that song?” Carol whispered, too quietly but she was sure Maria would hear her. “That song you taught me? It was like a game?”

“[Shake Sugaree](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLIEIbuh71o)?” 

~

“Elizabeth Cotten should be on the twenty-dollar bill,” Maria huffed. 

Carol tried to laugh through the stitch in her side but couldn’t manage it. It was probably for the best, considering how seriously Maria took the subject. Carol was learning that the blues was not something Maria was likely to joke about. 

“Ok, sure,” Carol wheezed. “How about—we focus—on that after—this—stupid—marathon.”

“It’s barely been 10 miles, Danvers. Only a quarter-mile to go.”

“Kill yourself.”

“Your conditioning is for shit.”

Carol wheezed again. 

“Anyway,” Maria huffed out eloquently. “Talking distracts from the pain.”

Carol snorted. “What pain—I don’t—feel pain.”

“That’s why you’ll never make it in the blues.”

“The blues—are dead.”

Maria glared at Carol’s strained face until she noticed. Then she slowly lifted both middle-fingers and took off for the finish line. Carol cursed and tried sprinting after her, but Maria’s legs were longer and she had been living in Colorado, acclimating, a solid four months before Carol had arrived. 

When Carol stumbled over the fading white line in the track she nearly tipped over onto the grass. 

“No way, dumbass,” Maria said, gripping her arm. “We need to cool down. Keep it moving.”

“Sure, ok, Lucifer,” Carol muttered, glad her blushing at Maria’s touch could be successfully excused by the flush of exercise. 

As they walked around the track, light on their shaky legs, Maria started humming. 

“Elizabeth Cotten?” Carol asked, hands linked on top of her head, keeping her lungs expanded. 

“Yeah,” Maria said in between her long breaths, in her nose, out her mouth. “It’s like a game. Used to play it with my grandma.”

Carol listened for a minute to the melody before jumping in with the harmony. Maria’s own voice stuttered against Carol’s and she laughed. 

“Sorry,” Maria said, wide eyes drooping and her mouth curving into a shy smile. “I ain’t that good a singer, really. But you keep going. I like your voice.”

Carol was slowly getting used to the gentle space carving itself out between her and Maria. There was normally such a necessity for hardness, for and against all things, that when she and Maria were alone, were breathing and singing together—it was like Carol was re-meeting her own self and re-meeting the world. 

Carol kept singing and thought about pulling Maria against her—leading her in a simple two-step while she hummed in her ear—keeping Maria’s senses filled with all the affection that was blooming like a wild garden within her. Maria had stars in her eyes and maybe Carol would never be able to match that shine—

—but she could sing Maria’s favorite song. 

~

“That’s the one,” Carol snapped her fingers silently. “I’ve got it stuck in my head, the melody at least.”

“Well the game is to make up your own verses,” Maria said.

“How’s it start?”

“You can’t trick me into singing,” Maria said firmly.

“I haven’t lost all sense of perspective,” Carol said, wanting to protest but knowing better. Maria wasn’t a trained singer, but to Carol, when Maria would sing Monica to bed, Pavarotti practically croaked in comparison. “Just say the lyrics.”

Maria shook her head, letting her fond grin drop onto her lap. 

“Hmm,” she said, reaching for the words. “I think it goes: _Have a little song / won’t take long / Sing it right / once or twice / Oh Lordy me / Didn’t I shake sugaree / E’vry thing I got is done and pawned / E’vry thing I got is done and pawned…”_

Carol joined her speaking with singing, matching the low pitch of Maria’s near-whisper. Maria dropped off on the second verse, but Carol continued to sing softly before she got to her favorite one. 

“Got a little secret / Ain’t gonna tell / I’m going to heaven in a brown pea shell…”

Carol rolled her head on the headrest as she tried to recall the rest of the song. But Maria was apparently not going to be of any use to her. 

She was shimmering, the tips of her hair were sparkling bright green, and the tips of her fingers were flickering. Her eyes were wide and shaded completely like black olives. Carol watched, entranced, as Maria flipped off the van’s headlights, plunging the highway into pitch dark—

Carol looked to the road newly lit in starlight. The desert night sky was vast and unrelentingly bright. Carol leaned forward in her seat to better peer out the window, momentarily distracted by the eeriness of racing down a dark road at sixty miles per hour, under the clearest sky she had yet to see since her return to earth. 

Carol whispered to Maria, not sure if Maria would hear, “Stars look different from the ground.”

Maria drove on, delicately, needing no guidance for the turns even Carol struggled to see. She nestled into her seat, facing Maria, cataloguing the twitches on her face and in her hand. Carol waited for the glow to fade, but it didn’t. 

“Should I keep singing?” Carol asked, not expecting an answer. 

“Yes,” a half-asleep Monica chimed in a grumble from the back-seat. 

Carol started humming absently, eyes fixed anxiously on Maria’s shimmering form, not sure what song it was, but imagining that if she voiced enough of her longing, Maria might physically feel it. Her mouth found the chorus. 

_“But don’t talk put your head on my shoulder,_  
_Come close, close your eyes, and be still,_  
_Don’t talk, take my hand, and listen to my heart beat_  
_Listen, listen, listen…”_

  
_Remember when we went stargazing that first time? I remember how I touched your shoulder, just a little. It was hard to figure out how to touch you without giving away how much more I wanted, but sometimes…sometimes it was easy. I remember I put my head on your shoulder and you put your head on mine, and we didn’t touch anywhere else, but that was…that was—that was it, you know? Your shoulder was warm. And that was it._

  
~

Carol shot awake in half-a-second, alarm bells going off in her stomach. The fingertips of dawn were skimming the horizon to her right and Maria was shedding sparkling green dust like Tinkerbell to her left. Her eyes were wide, pinpricks of concentrated light burning in her pupils. Maria was crying, her hands clenched on the steering wheel and her shoulders shaking with panic. 

Carol swallowed her gasp and reached out to Maria, hands hovering over the hairs on Maria’s arms and the very short curls on her scalp, still glimmering in the relative dark. 

“Maria,” Carol whispered urgently. “Maria, babe, what’s wrong?”

Carol’s sight caught on a road sign letting them know they were 40 miles out from Roswell. Just down the highway, she could see they were approaching a town. 

“Damn, Maria,” Carol hissed, her heart falling out the bottom of her ribs as she kept herself from running her fingers across Maria’s shivering arms. “We missed Carlsbad.”

Maria didn’t respond. A few minutes later, after Carol repeatedly tried to wake her up and nearly bit off her own hands to keep them from Maria’s body, Maria lifted her foot from the gas.

“What?” Carol whispered to herself. “Maria, why are we stopping—”

Just as Maria turned into an empty lot outside a general store, she slammed on the break and the whole van rocked as they screeched to a halt. 

“What the fuck,” Fury growled, bolting upright, his hand reaching for the phone at his hip. 

“Ughhh, Mom,” Monica groaned, pulling her sleeping bag over her head. 

Carol watched, scared and mesmerized, as Maria slipped lightly out of the car and walked around the back. Carol scrambled to follow her and had to bite back a slightly hysterical and nervous laugh as Maria climbed the back of the car and plopped nonchalantly on top of the roof, legs crossed, eyes forward. 

Talos and Fury came round the other side car, rubbing their faces, Fury glaring nastily at the sun. 

“I repeat,” Fury said. “What the fuck, Danvers.”

“I don’t fucking _know_ ,” Carol said, running her hand over her scalp, wishing she still had hair to clutch. “She was fine all night. She just, wanted to stop I guess?”

“Was she sparkly all night?” Fury asked, eyebrow raised. 

“Yes, but I’m telling you she was fine.”

“Do you think this is fine now?”

Carol made a frustrated noise. “I don’t know, Fury!”

“I think we’re attracting an audience,” Talos said, pointing across the street. 

A rancher was standing next to his truck at the gas station across the street. When he noticed the combined wary glares of Talos, Fury, and Carol, he raised his arm in a hospitable acknowledgment. Carol was twitchy enough to want to march over and demand a reason for his presence so early on a nearly empty highway, but another man appeared out of the store, holding two cups of coffee, cowboy hat hanging off his neck, and the rancher turned away. 

“That’s them,” Maria said. Carol whirled back around. Maria was blinking away the lingering emerald shine, but instead of the lost and confused expression she wore after her small trips out of real spacetime, she was frowning with apprehension and alertness. 

“Maria?” Carol asked. 

Maria stayed seated on top of the van, gazing cautiously across the street. The men were chatting and leaning against their truck, shoulders brushing close together, their happiness loud and assertive in the empty desert atmosphere. 

“Just wait a minute,” Maria said. “Keep an eye on them.”

“You going to tell us why?” Fury asked. 

“You’ll see,” Maria replied after some hesitation. She locked eyes with Carol and Carol sighed. 

“Whatever you say, Photon,” Carol said, following Maria’s directions. 

The side door opened and Addie came around the back of the van. “What’s going on? Why’d we stop?”

“Spy mission,” Talos said. “Subjects are across the street.”

Addie started to ask for clarification when another truck pulled up to the station, several boys squatted in the back. They leapt out of the car, laughing, one of them shouting about coffee and cigarettes. All were dressed like cow pokes and were boisterous, teasing the two friendly older ranchers, now standing further apart, as they started pumping gas and piling into the tiny store.

“What exactly are we watching them for?”

“Are we watching the first two dudes or the kids?”

Maria shook her head and said, “All of them.”

One of the teenagers, stick-thin, freckled, and pale, was sidling up to the two ranchers. He was waving his cigarette around, words too low to make out from the other side of the road, but Carol could tell they were aggressive. One of the men, the one without a hat but with two braids framing his face, was stepping forward, hands raised in a calming gesture, keeping his friend behind him. 

“Shit,” Fury intoned under his breath, jaw fixing resignedly into place.

Carol was already making her way across the street when the teenager flicked a cigarette in the rancher’s face. 

“ _Basta_!” the man’s friend snapped, yanking the other back while he hissed at the slight burn. 

The teenager was laughing and shrugging while he started walking into the store. He tossed over his shoulder, loud enough for Carol to hear as she made it to the other side of the road, “Whatever, fags.”

“Howdy!” Carol shouted, just as the rest of the kids were stumbling out of the store. They all turned their wild eyes on her, mouths sliding into slimy smiles as they recognized her buzzed hair and lipstick-less frown.

“ _Qué estás haciendo?_ ” The older rancher muttered as she walked past them, still hanging onto the other man’s arm.

“Y’all maybe want to apologize before I break your noses?” Carol asked, raising her eyebrows.

“Come on, Josh,” one of the pokes said, handing him a coffee. “Leave ‘em, we gotta go.”

Freckles rolled his eyes, sipped his coffee, said, “Sorry,” then threw the coffee in Carol’s face. 

Then the air shattered and the sun turned green. 

~

Carol blinked against the green blast. When she could focus her gaze again, she was back across the street, watching the two cow pokes laughing. 

Addie was stepping quickly around the van, saying, “What’s going on? Why’d we stop?”

There was a pause where Carol, Fury, and Talos all turned slowly to her. 

“Wait,” she said, voice soft. “We just—we just did this?”

“What’s mommy doing?” Monica shouted, peering out from the back window. 

Carol followed Monica’s finger back to the gas station. Maria was coming out of the store with a new hat and a pack of cigarettes, one dangling out of her mouth. She nodded politely at the men, glanced both ways, and jogged over the road back to Carol. 

“Got a light, hon?” Maria asked while Addie, Talos, and Fury all frowned heavily at her. She plucked the cigarette from her lips and held it delicately out to Carol. 

Carol snapped her fingers and her thumbnail lit up with fissioning fire. She offered it up to Maria who grinned. 

“So,” Carol said casually, struggling to pin down the roiling emotions fighting for attention in her head. “What the fuck was that?”

Maria lifted the new knock-off Stetson onto her head and exhaled a sparkling green sheen of smoke up into the sky. The dry desert air brightened briefly and Carol could smell things like ‘rain’ and ‘wet.’ Maria shrugged. 

“Figured those boys were due a flat-tire,” Maria said. “They’re back that way—‘bout three miles yonder.” 

“Uh-huh,” Fury said. “Cool. What?”

~

Maria saw the coffee evaporate instantly on Carol’s skin and watched in horror as Carol’s body started to evaporate with it. The explosion normally contained by her will split Carol open and set the air alight. The sunlight dimmed in the face of Carol’s luminous and contained combustion. The cowboys stumbled against their trucks while Carol screamed herself back to embodiment. 

Maria dropped to her hands and knees, fingers gripping the un-paved lot, and deep within that touch she pulled at the water held below the surface. Ground water swelled and suddenly she sat in the bayou grass, knees sinking into the wet bank. All around her was swamp and towering cypresses. 

“How interesting.”

Maria twisted toward the voice and slipped against the mud. She fell back in the shallow water, hands finding purchase on the mossy river stones. 

Before her stood a beautiful black man, calf deep in the marsh. He held a sword, was dressed like a knight, and there was a bright white light emanating like smoke from his form. 

“So you have Seen,” the man said. “You know what it is to See.”

Maria swallowed. 

“Where’s Carol?” she choked out, too tense to move out of the water. 

“You know,” the man said. “Just look for her.”

Maria glanced quickly around, breathing deeply on instinct to stave off the panic. 

“I don’t—” she stuttered. “I can’t— what am I supposed— I’m stuck—”

“You’ve been here before,” he said over her croaking voice. “Just ask the water.”

Without her conscious permission, Maria’s body leapt up and she found herself kneeling in the water, watching the water-bugs dance on the slight ripples. The cypress roots were lifting off the banks, reaching for her, and the sunlight took on a faint green tinge from filtering through their leaves. 

She looked into the water and saw a truck ambling along the road, teenage cowboys laughing in the dust. One of the cypress branches tapped her on the shoulder and held out a hardy sharpened rock. She nodded and the rock fell into the water. The truck bumped and its back tire went out. 

Maria fell forward, face first, and breathed in the desert air. 

~

Once they made it to Roswell, Monica and Talos insisted on stopping at every tourist trap within city limits. Fury, Maria, and Carol all waited outside in a diner parking lot while Talos, Bripteth, and Monica dragged Addie into another alien-themed ‘museum’ gift shop. 

Carol was lightly rumbling with leftover anxiety, watching the road carefully. Fury and Maria were leaning against the car, Maria’s hat tilted over her eyes so she could slip into a half-nap of sorts. 

“If those _vaqueros_ back there had been a little more discrete,” Fury announced out of nowhere, his face twitching with a personal sort of poison. 

Maria bristled and clenched her fists but before she could start yelling, Carol had stepped forward and shoved Fury hard. He hit the side of the van and the little moisture in the air evaporated instantly. 

“Fuck you,” Carol ground out, flexing her arms as they tried to dissolve from the brief human contact. “Shut the fuck up.”

Fury rolled his eyes. “Jesus, Carol, you know what I am.”

“You should know better,” she said. 

Maria stepped close to Carol who flinched away from her. The air between them stopped crackling as Carol turned her face away from Maria’s disappointment and Fury’s incredulity. 

“We look like a couple of dykes,” Maria said, focusing on the line of Carol’s jaw, tracing the edges of her buzzed hair, her shoulders and biceps, her sports bra, her long-fingered hands, clipped nails and rough knuckles. 

Maria swallowed down her worry and said, forcibly light, meeting Fury’s anxious gaze, “If not for the fact she would literally explode, rest assured, Nick, that my hands would be all over her. Nothing discrete about it.”

Carol dropped her head, an odd painful laugh escaping her. 

Fury brought the heel of his hand up to his eye and pressed hard. 

“We have a right to exist,” Carol whispered. “Don’t buy into middle-America’s bullshit, Nick. Not you.”

Fury shuddered once and when he looked up, he narrowed in on Talos, disguised as an Australian tourist, testing out his new cowboy boots by doing a rough imitation of the cotton-eyed joe dance he saw on youtube. 

“Fuck off,” he replied, his eye shiny. 

“Also,” Maria said. “I’m pretty sure those dudes were Navajo, you racist.” 

~

The alien-themed diner was both garish and spectacular. Once they all got settled in a booth, except for Carol who sat a table over, each with their own UFO-related ice cream treat, Fury returned to his interrogation of Maria’s new ‘time-ly’ powers. 

“It’s hard to explain,” Maria said, keeping her eyes on the waitress moving swiftly around the diner and avoiding Carol’s piercing gaze. “I just, kind of, pull, and suddenly I’m outside of everything. Well, not outside of. I guess that’s impossible. But I’m somewhere new.”

“That explains absolutely nothing,” Fury said with faux cheerfulness, spooning a heap of whipped cream from his milkshake. “Just say you time-traveled and stop trying to confuse us.”

“I don’t think she did time-travel, Nicholas,” Talos said, leaning his cheek on his open palm. “It’s like, inter-dimensional travel. Or intra. She didn’t leave us, correct?”

“What the hell are you talking about? She just said she gave those dumbasses a flat tire!”

“Yes, but she didn’t leave,” Talos said patiently while wiping a bit of chocolate ice-cream off Bripteth’s nose. “Just like before. She was in her bed asleep and behind Adelaide’s home, simultaneously.”

“Sounds like what happens when someone time travels,” Fury said, fully abandoning his own sundae to argue. 

“Well, maybe,” Talos said. 

Fury threw up his hands. 

“Here,” Addie said, pushing her napkin to the middle of the table. “This napkin is one continuous plane. It has two dimensions”— she rain her index finger lengthwise, then widthwise—“and in those dimensions are an infinite number of points. I can put my finger down on one point”—she placed the tip of her finger in the middle of the napkin—“and where my finger touches the napkin is where my finger exists in those two dimensions. I can move it horizontally, diagonally, vertically, but if I move it up and down”—she lifted her hand—“I am no longer in those two dimensions. Time travel is when I put my finger back down in another spot. But”—she put two finger-tips down at the same time—“I can always stay in the plane and move my other finger.”

Fury glared down at the napkin. 

“I know you think that makes sense,” he said.

“Well, Nick,” she replied, crossing her arms. “Don’t say I didn’t try.”

“I’m going for a walk,” Carol said, leaping abruptly out of her chair. “Meet y’all at the car in fifteen.”

Maria dropped her hat back on her head. 

“Make it twenty,” she said as she scooted out of their booth. 

She found Carol marching along a barbed-wire fence behind the diner, leaving a purplish smoke trail behind her, attracting the nervous attention of the cattle several yards beyond.

Maria stepped over the cactus and prickly brush Carol had bull-dozed through. As she drew closer to her, she could see the trembling had returned to Carol’s skin, the strange cracking pattern shimmering like a cigarette butt on her arms, neck, and legs. 

“I didn’t want this to happen,” Carol, voice muted and breaking. “I really, really did not want this to happen to you.”

“Carol,” Maria sighed. “It’s—”

“If you say ‘it’s fine,’ I will scream, I swear to fuck,” Carol snapped. “None of this is fine.”

“Don’t be so fucking condescending,” Maria said. “I’m not the one on the verge of collapsing every second—”

“Like you have _any_ sort of control right now—”

“Are you serious, right now? You’re questioning my control—”

“Well do _have_ any?”

Maria cut off her retort at its root, tracking the flickering in Carol’s eyes. 

“I—” Maria started. “Carol, come on. This ain’t so bad.”

“You just drift away without any warning at all,” Carol gasped. “How is this whole shit-show not the scariest fucking thing for you—”

Carol pulled up short.

“This ain’t even close to the scariest thing to happen to me,” Maria said softly. 

Carol breathed deeply. The dry air swirled around them in a warm breeze and the cracks in her skin faded back under the surface.

“Sorry,” Carol said. “I just… I just, I saw you, glowing like a goddamn lantern, driving a car blind as bat, literally panicking in the seat and there wasn’t a single useful thing I could do.”

Maria traced the sunburn on Carol’s forehead with her eyes. Then she pulled her hat off and held it out. They grasped it together for a moment, both staring at the other’s hand. 

“I felt closer to you when you were halfway across the galaxy,” Maria confessed in a whisper. 

“Would it be better if I just left y’all alone?” Carol asked. 

Maria jerked her gaze away from Carol’s hand. Their eyes met and Maria saw in Carol’s face a petrified wariness beneath a transparent stoic mask. A guttural, _“No”_ ripped out of Maria’s throat. 

“ _No_ , Carol. When we’re not together—” Maria stumbled to say “—either you explode or I disappear.”

“I’m too much for you,” Carol said. “You’ve always thought it.”

Maria’s whole body felt cold. 

“No, I mean, yes, I thought it, I was a coward.” Maria stammered. “But I was wrong. We fit, Carol. I want a life—”

“Hey!” 

They both jumped at Fury’s shout. Maria let go of the hat and turned. Fury was standing  by the garbage cans in the parking lot, waving his phone.

“Sorry to interrupt y’all’s sweet nothings and shit! But I got something you two should probably hear!”

~

“Got a call from Coulson,” Fury said, rubbing his temple. “Apparently the WSC wants us to stand down. Or, they want me to make Carol stand down, because they’re mostly unaware of the rest of you tag-alongs and definitely don’t know about Maria or Monica.”

Carol clenched her fists, accidentally dissolving her own fingertips against the skin of her palms. Maria shot her a stony look over the mass of Monica’s curls. 

“So the Feds no longer want Carol to handle the leftover core traces in Yellowstone that are attracting powerful aliens to the earth like moths to a lightbulb?” Addie ventured icily.  

“In summation,” Fury said. “Yes.”

“I don’t trust that,” Addie said, raising her eyebrows. 

“Of course you don’t,” Fury said. “If you trusted the Feds, they’re doing something wrong.”

“I know you think that makes sense,” Addie said tartly. 

“Obviously, they’ve figured out another way to deal with it,” Fury said, trying to find some reasoning and failing. 

“Why are you so eager to believe this, Nick?” Addie asked. “I thought better of you.”

“Maybe Carol was never the best option to begin with,” Fury said, the lines in his face setting grimly. “Maybe this was all a fun road trip to her destruction, which, let me remind you, would mean the destruction of the planet.”

“To be fair, Nicky ol’ pal,” Carol said. “If I can’t manage to fly to Yellowstone on my own without falling apart, I probably can’t stop alien-forces from nuking the planet.”

“So what is the new plan, Captain?” Talos asked Carol. 

Fury scowled. “Address your questions to ranking official. She’s not in charge.”

“Yes, she is,” Monica piped up, handing over her gameboy to an eager Bripteth. 

“Arm wrestling does not a leader make,” Fury replied. 

“Let’s just call it a democracy and move on,” Maria said. “What’s the plan? Are we still going to Idaho?”

“I am,” Carol said. “But y’all aren’t.”

“Like hell.” Maria said serenely. 

“I think we should all go,” Addie said. “Carol ain’t gonna get better by doing nothing. Maybe the core traces could help her. They are basically parts of her at this point, right?”

Fury shook his head and pinched the skin between his eyebrows. 

“I had a stellar record before meeting you, Danvers,” he said. “I hope you know that.”

“Yeah, I figured,” Carol said. “Alright, let’s get on the road again.”

“I know that song!” Talos shouted. 

~


	8. Chapter 8

_"Wyrd oft nereð̠  / unfægne eorl, þonne his ellen dēah! (Wyrd often spares / an un-doomed man, when his valor endures!)"_

_\- Beowulf, Unnamed Poet_

 

 **The Proposal** : 

Maria sat on her bunk, chewing on a hangnail, trying not to feel indignant. 

“I’m not saying you should,” Carol said through her mostly sealed lips, as she concentrated on sewing a neat line in Maria’s pants. “Only that you could, if you had no other option.”

“The only option one would have,” Maria said, holding the pant leg straight. “Is to not make cake altogether.”

“Oh, don’t be such a snob,” Carol said. “Just because something is done one way for thousands of years, doesn’t mean we have to do it that way now.”

“Cake without eggs is not cake,” Maria said. “Are we supposed to start making creme brûlée without eggs now too? Madelines? Omelets?”

“Jesus,” Carol rolled her eyes. “This is why people hate the French.”

“I’m not French,” Maria said, repulsed. “How dare you.”

“Whatever you are,” Carol said, flexing her fingers before re-threading her needle. “You’re an elitist whose impossible to please.”

“Just follow a normal recipe if you ever make me cake,” Maria said. “If you give me cake with applesauce, I’ll never speak to you again.”

“For so idealistic a person, you sure have a weirdly proper way of looking at things,” Carol muttered, bending closer over the fabric. 

“I’m not idealistic.” 

“Not French, not idealistic,” Carol replied. “I just can’t get a read on you, can I?”

Maria had no response but to watch quietly as Carol tied off her stitch and trimmed it. 

“There!” she proclaimed. “One specially tailored pair of pants for Empress Maria, who is very rational about all things.”

Maria took them carefully and folded them under Carol’s smug smile. 

“Thanks, Danvers,” she said, touching the beautifully tiny stitch with the outside of her pinky. 

“No problem, dude,” Carol said, swinging her legs off the bed, and standing up, her body silhouetted by the setting sun in the window. She stretched, throwing her arms over her head and arching her back and some very profound part of Maria screamed to be set free. 

“Hey,” Maria ventured. “You wanna go for a walk?”

Carol glanced at her watch, still arching her back, giving herself several chins as she scrunched her neck. 

“Curfew’s in an half-and-hour…” Carol trailed off. 

“Sunset’s now,” Maria replied, getting up off her bed and grabbing her jacket. 

Carol laughed and gestured widely with her hands. “After you, your serene-ness.”

They walked together out of the barracks, shoulders brushing, knuckles knocking, and Maria’s heart was ticking with the simple sway of Carol’s ponytail. 

“There was big pendulum in the museum back home,” Maria said, out of nowhere. 

“I don’t know why I always forget you’re from an actual city,” Carol said. “You’re so bohemian.”

“I hated it,” Maria continued. 

Carol tilted her head, her face scrunched in consideration. They made it outside and Maria headed for the wooded cross-country trail behind the field. 

“Nah,” Carol said. “I can’t figure out why. You’ll just have to tell me.”

“Do you like pendulums?” Maria asked. 

“Hell no,” Carol said. “They’re kinda freaky, aren’t they?”

Maria laughed. 

“That’s why I hate them,” Maria said. “It thrilled me so much, made me so excited about—everything, I guess—that I freaked out. Now it’s hard for me to even look at an analog watch.”

Carol nodded, tucking her hands into her pocket, and whistled lowly, nose turned up to smell the pine. 

“Not to poke holes in your very-valid feelings,” Carol said, low-pitched and smooth. “But sometimes it’s ok to be excited about the world.”

~

Monica flipped onto her back, peeling her cheek away from the skin on her mother’s bare leg. The hand that had been cradling her shoulder slipped down between Monica’s body and the back of the seat. She blinked at the stained car ceiling, focusing on the vibration of the wheels on pavement and the bright orange light shifting through the mountain pines and aspens. She could feel the deep rumbling on her back and hear her mother’s slumbering breaths. 

“What are you thinking, hon?” Carol asked. She was stretched out in the space between the front seats and the door, keeping her distance. 

Monica, head resting against her mother, used to put her feet up on Carol’s lap. Carol would scratch her mosquito bites for her while her mother gently worked through the tangles in her hair. 

“You and mommy met in Colorado, right?” Monica asked. 

“That’s right,” Carol said. She kept her volume low, which Monica didn’t like, even if it was because the whole car was napping. Auntie Carol was loud, with a smooth deep voice. “It’s where we trained originally for the Air Force. Where your father went to school, too.”

Monica rolled her eyes. 

“Did you have to set bear traps?” Monica asked. “Did you have to call the park rangers?”

“What, you don’t think I could have fought off a bear on my own?” Carol asked. 

“Only ‘cause mommy wouldn’t have let you.”

Carol grinned. 

“Your mommy has always been a bit of a soft touch,” Carol said, leaning forward and tilting her head down, like she was sharing a secret. 

“What’s that mean?” Monica asked. Of course her mother’s touches were soft. 

“It means,” Carol said. “That your mommy would have done something even sillier.”

“What?”

“She would have tried to be the bear’s friend.”

Monica returned her eyes to the ceiling and the dust particles flipping lazily through the glimmering afternoon sun. 

“That’d be pretty cool,” she decided. “Having a bear for a friend. Then you could cuddle in the winter, right? And always stay warm, even when it’s snowing. What’s snow like?”

Carol was silent but Monica figured she was just thinking. 

“It’s a lot of things,” Carol finally said. Monica looked at her. She was leaning her face on her knees, arms wrapped around her calves, fingers dangling down around her dirty bare feet. Her cheek was smooshed up where she was leaning on it and her eyes were far away for a moment before focusing warmly on Monica. Monica wished Carol would hug her. 

“Sometimes it’s rough,” Carol continued. “Sometimes it’s so cold your teeth hurt. Sometimes it’s gross and muddy and icy and dangerous. But the first snowfall, that’s the best kind. It falls like powdered sugar and makes everything quiet and soft.”

Monica considered this, looking past Carol out the window where purple hills were swimming on the clear horizon. 

“I hate the quiet,” Monica said. 

“Don’t make your mind up now,” Carol replied. “You can be a lot of things, too.”

~

“I certainly wouldn’t mind staying here a little longer,” Addie said, almost embarrassed. They stood gazing at the looming flatirons, resplendent in summer green and healthy, stony red.

“There’s an Emmylou song about Boulder, right?” Carol asked. 

“I should think so,” Addie replied. “I’d write a song about it right now, if you wanted.”

“Ok, we’re blocking the sidewalk, let’s keep it moving,” Fury said. “Look and walk at the same time, please. They’re mountains, they ain’t going anywhere.”

“Actually, Mr. Fury,” Bripteth piped up. “They’re eroding.”

“Apologies,” Fury said. “They ain’t going anywhere fast. Just like us, apparently.”

“If you want to tell Talos he doesn’t need a fancy pair of hiking sandals, be my guest,” Carol said. “But I’m not a fan of crushing hopes and dreams, like you.”

“Are you a fan of getting sent to Federal prison?” Fury snapped. 

“Yes,” Carol said without hesitation, but she corralled Bripteth, Monica, and Addie to a bench down the block. 

“I think we’re going to have to start strategizing,” Fury said as Maria walked up to them, carrying a tray of sodas and several sticks of roasted corn on the cob. 

“I’m thinking we start with the corn and if we’re still feeling hungry, which I know I will, we’ll hit up the funnel-cake stand,” Carol said sincerely. 

“We really should not have stopped for a summer fair,” Fury said slowly. “We really should not have done that.”

“I think this is just a regular Saturday, actually,” Addie commented with a breathless sort of thrill. “What a nice community.”

“Wow,” Carol said. “I didn’t realize you were capable of saying anything nice about places that aren’t Louisiana.”

“Well,” Addie grumbled, sipping primly on her soda. “It’s far too dry.”

“No it’s not,” Monica said. “I like it. I want to learn to ski.”

“Skiing goes against the will of god,” Addie said, handing Monica and Bripteth napkins. “Wipe your hands—you’ve got butter everywhere.”

Fury sat heavily down on the brick-pavement and let his head fall back into the sun. He closed his eyes and waved his hand, flapping his wrist like a bored princess: “Carry on.”

Maria dropped her backpack in his lap and sat down next to him, squinting on the mud streaks caked on Carol’s ankles. 

“Skiing ain’t that bad,” she said. 

“Yes, it is.” Carol and Addie said at the same time. Addie shot her an affronted look and Carol smugly finished off her second corn-on-the-cob. 

“Well,” Talos said, walking up. “What do you think? Good color, right?” He poked Fury’s forehead and stuck his foot under his nose. 

“Get your pasty Teva foot out of my face,” Fury grumbled, running a finger over the bright purple band strapped across Talos’s human-disguised feet. He pushed the foot away and Talos, unperturbed, bounced over to Bripteth and Monica for praise. 

“You ever been skiing, Talos?” Monica asked.

“We had something more similar to snowboarding on our home planet,” Talos replied, settling next to Addie. “I was a champion, many times.

“That’s wonderful, dear,” Addie said, patting Talos’s knee. 

“If we’re done talking ‘bout the winter olympics—” Fury said, leaning forward and taking off his sunglasses. 

“I personally like figure skating,” Carol added. 

“Gay,” Maria said. 

“I don’t care for the winter olympics,” Addie said. “They’re racist.” 

“I’m gonna compete,” Monica said. “Then they won’t be racist.”

“That’s not how it works, sweet,” Addie said. 

“Ok!” Fury snapped his fingers. “Eyes on me!”

A family with two kids sticky with snow-cones shuffled by with alarmed faces. Fury ignored them, pulling out a map and spreading it out on the brick. Bripteth jumped up to place two rocks from her new collection on the corners to keep it from blowing away. 

“So,” Fury said, clicking a pen open. “Seven years ago, Carol had her little accident somewhere to the west of Yellowstone park, in Bumfuck, Idaho.”

“Accident,” Carol snorted. 

“Is that what we’re calling deliberately setting off a nuclear-explosion?” Maria asked sourly. 

“I saved the world, you ungrateful dick,” Carol muttered, licking the chili-salt off her corn-stick. 

“Not mine, asshole,” Maria said pleasantly, putting her hands behind her on the warm side-walk and leaning back to look at the blinding Colorado sky. 

“Shut the fuck up,” Carol said, chucking her empty soda-cup at Maria’s smirk. 

“If ya’ll are done flirting,” Fury said. “The small bit of intel I managed to get before the higher-ups pulled the plug puts the crash in Idaho but the remnants of Lawson’s core scattered north-east.” He dragged the end of his pen over into Montana. “Apparently, this ‘energy’ has been filtering into the mountain ranges—like it’s seeking higher-ground or something. 

“Wait,” Maria said, leaning forward to frown at the map. “You’re not saying it’s in Yellowstone, right? Literally the most dangerous place on the planet for it to be?”

“Not yet,” Fury said. 

“It’s probably not higher-elevation pulling at the core,” Carol said. “It—I— _we_ feed off of constant chemical reaction, in a really basic sense.”

“That’s why it’s found a home in your body,” Maria said, peeking up at her. “If a biological organism can stand it—it’ll find a home there.”

“Problem is,” Fury said. “How many biological organisms can stand it?”

“If I’m hearing this all correctly,” Addie said. “This highly advanced form of nuclear energy is traveling through the ground, feeding off the primordial soup created by the Caldera that is sitting way to close to the surface of the earth, threatening to explode on everything, even without the catalyst of that highly advanced form of nuclear energy?”

Fury, Maria, and Carol just looked at her. 

“Right, ok,” Addie continued. “And the plan to fix all this is to have this unstable lunatic”—she pointed at Carol—“what, collect it before it ignites the greatest natural disaster since the dinosaurs?”

“That was always the plan,” Fury said, annoyed.

Addie glared up at Carol. “You’re getting worse, though,” she said. “You’re getting worse. Will you even be able to handle it?”

Carol shrugged and said offhandedly, “Darkest hour and all that, Ms. Adelaide.”

Talos clapped his hands once loudly and said, “Time for funnel cake.”

~

“What did your grandma mean?” Bripteth asked. “About Ms. Carol getting worse?”

Monica rolled her eyes and said, “Maw-maw just doesn’t like Auntie, is all. She always thought she was crazy.”

Bripteth nodded, unconvinced. 

“I think she’s right,” Bripteth said. 

“Shhhh,” Monica hissed, peering quickly over the back seat, where Addie and Fury were napping, past Talos reading, to the front where Carol and her mother were arguing over a song on the radio. “They’ll hear you.”

“Sorry.”

“And what did you mean, anyway?” Monica demanded, putting down her cards. “My Auntie’s not crazy.” 

“I didn’t mean that,” Bripteth said. “I just meant that I think she’s getting worse.”

Monica glowered. 

“No,” Monica said. “She’s fine. She’s sitting right up there, doing fine.”

Bripteth opened her mouth, closed it, considered, then opened it again, paused, then said, “She’s not driving anymore.”

“So?”

“She’s been wearing less clothes, even though it’s colder outside.”

“She likes tank-tops. Mom said it’s to show off her muscles.”

Bripteth nodded, agreeing this time. 

“Yes, ok, but she’s also always got those lines on her, now. Like cracks.”

Monica scooted as far away from Bripteth as possible, folding herself over her knees and glaring out the window. 

“Shut up,” Monica said, barely moving her lips. “Just shut up.”

Bripteth put down her own cards and scooted after her. She placed an arm around Monica’s shoulders and leaned her head on hers. They watched the landscape whizzing by, silently, for a while after that. 

~

**Another Proposal:**

“Any weird cravings yet?” Carol asked, poking at Maria’s hip with her toe. 

The dry Arizona grass was itchy on the backs of Maria’s arms, but she also hadn’t been so comfortable in what felt like years. Words like _Safe/Secure/Protected/Loved/Warm_ kept filtering into her conscious brain, unasked for, making it difficult for Maria to shield herself.

“I ain’t been pregnant that long,” Maria mumbled, too sleepy to move her mouth properly. 

“That’s a pity,” Carol said. “Now I don’t have a good excuse for dipping my barbecue chips in my milkshake.”

“I’ll do it with you,” Maria said. “Solidarity, and all that.”

“Do you think it’ll taste good?”

“Yeah, actually,” Maria said. “Like sweet n’ sour chicken, or something.”

“Yeah,” Carol said, laying down next to her, satisfied. “Exactly.”

She was quiet for a moment, listening to the distant road and wind surging against the parched earth. 

“So, are you the milkshake or the barbecue chip?”

Maria laughed, hand going immediately to her stomach, startled slightly out of her almost-nap. 

“Barbecue chip, definitely,” she said. 

“I agree,” Carol said, sagely. 

The rhythm of the crinkling sheets on the clothesline and the crunch of distant feet in neighboring back-yards soothed Maria once more. Carol’s breathing next to her steadily unleashed a series of tight bands in her chest—strained since she had left Carol’s side months ago before joining her and Dr. Lawson in Arizona. The deep peace she saw in the line linking her and Carol, tied invisibly around their wrists, terrified her. But she needed it now, before she was forced to cut herself off from it forever. 

Carol started humming, a Whitney song, slowed down and sweet. 

“Someday, I’ll take you dancing,” Carol said, eyes closed and smile wide. She turned her face, so her lips brushed ever so lightly against Maria’s exposed shoulder. “I’ll dance with you all night—keep people from bumping against your belly. I’ll protect you. I'll protect both of you.”

Maria’s eyes stung from the force of love that erupted within her. 

“Sure, Carol,” Maria said. “As long as you’re ok with me stepping on your feet.”

~

“Carol,” Maria said, breaking her own heart in two and she broke the kiss—the sweetest kiss she had ever tasted. “Carol, I can’t. I'm going to be a _mother_. You’re—this—this is too much.”

Carol blinked back her tears, removing her hands from Maria’s rounded middle, and holding them clenched in her pockets. 

“Ok,” she said, smiling like a clown, rocks and salt in her throat. “Ok. You’re right. No problem.”

Maria watched her walk away, clutching her stomach, wishing she could offer Carol a lung, a liver, some blood—anything to fill that hollow smile. 

~

Carol knew they were driving to her death, and, for that reason, she felt it a particular injustice that they had to pay so much to get into the park. Or wait around forty-five minutes for the next eruption of Ol’ Faithful. 

“Ain’t public parks supposed to be affordable?” Fury grumbled, hooking the parking pass onto the rear-view mirror. 

“Now imagine an oil typhoon owns the country’s natural wonders and is charging you an entrance fee,” Addie said from where she leaned against the back of the van, eagerly flipping through the park newsletter. “Looks like there’s a Ranger talk on the re-introduction of wolves. That might be worth seeing.”

“Will any wolves be there?” Monica asked while Bripteth hovered keenly over Addie’s shoulder. 

“If they have any sense of entertainment, sure,” Addie said, winking. 

Carol looked for Maria, who had grown silent as the long empty stretch of Wyoming opened up the sky. She stood near the entrance of the boardwalk they had just pulled up to—the vapor from the hydrothermal vent just beyond lit up in silver against the dark evergreens, towering over the milling tourists in sandals and visors. Carol walked up to her haltingly, taking her time to note the color of her arms in the sun, the way her skin pinched on the smoothed-down wooden railing they rested on, the steady way she stood, leaning with her legs straight and feet forward, and the way that she was, as ever, looking up. 

Carol kept a solid five feet between them as she approached, picking her own spot on the railing over which to hover her fragile arms. 

“Some of those thermal pools kinda look like kool-aid,” Carol said. “And the only reason I haven’t tried to drink out of ‘em is that they smell like rotten eggs.”

“We’re never going to get married, are we,” Maria said, the matter-of-fact tone revealing the ache so much more than tears.

“That was never going to happen legally, anyway,” Carol said lightly. “But if it makes you feel any better, I could hand over my vows right now.”

Maria finally turned to her. The short hair suited her, far better than it did Carol. Her cheekbones caught the sunlight and her lofty, intelligent forehead gave something for Carol to focus on other than her eyes. 

“I’m going to be honest with you, Carol,” she said. “If you do that, I’ll fall to pieces.”

Carol held her gaze for a second, before dropping it to look down at her Maria’s cuffed jeans and sneakers. 

“I really can’t tell if you’re being serious or if you’re quoting Patsy Cline,” Carol said. 

Maria huffed a laugh, surprised at herself, as she turned back to watching the thermal-vapor rise over the tree-tops. “I’m always serious when I’m quoting Patsy Cline.”

 ~

Fury dragged Talos into the ranger station, telling himself they were the only adults now capable of being diplomatic. They shouldered past the displays of mountain lions and volcanoes and stood in line at the kiosk. Talos was immediately attracted to the display of the Park Ranger uniform, leaning close to the mannequin to examine the designs on the leather belt. 

“Those ain’t for sale,” Fury said, biting back a smile at the thought of Ranger Talos sitting around a campfire. 

Talos said, “It’s a fine uniform—do you think Monica and Bripteth might like those junior ranger packets?” He pointed to the sign under the mannequin. 

“Probably,” Fury said, grinning. “Let’s get one for Addie, too.”

When they made it to the information desk, a young, eager Ranger greeted them with an enthusiastic, “Howdy!” and Fury winced. 

“Howdy,” Talos replied, sincerely, perfectly adopting the twang, even though he was supposed to be Australian. 

“Hi,” Fury said, reaching into his pocket to pull out his CIA badge, figuring that was the most intimidating organization he worked for. “We’re gonna need to talk with your supervisor.”

~

“Ho, there!” Carol called. “What news do you bring?” 

Fury and Talos were walking quickly back to their van, each carrying a bursting gift-bag.

“Apparently, the Park has already been approached by the CIA,” Talos said, digging through his own bag to produce three Junior Ranger packs and three novelty pens. “They’ve been here for awhile.”

Fury tossed his own bag in the back of the van while Talos handed Monica, Addie, and Bripteth the packets and pens. 

“The superintendent is meeting us at the Northern Entrance,” Fury said, fixing a radio-piece in his ear. “It’s an open-secret among the park’s authorities, but they’ve been working with the Feds on some project.”

“Ranger Tom said he ‘has a bad feeling about it,’” Talos said, in Ranger Tom’s voice. “But we have to be discrete.”

“What’s scat?” Monica asked, pointing at the drawings on her packet. “Is it poop? Is scat _poop_?”

“The girls are hungry,” Addie said. “Let’s discretely have a picnic.”

“I want to see the buffaloes,” Bripteth said earnestly. 

Maria clutched her arms and sighed. “Did you speak to the superintendent?”

“Briefly,” Fury said, tossing the car-keys back and forth in his hands. “She’s not happy.”

“She thinks whatever they’re doing,” Talos added. “Is going to end badly.”

~

It took them half a day to arrive at the northern entrance in Montana. Addie kept Monica and Bripteth thoroughly distracted with their Junior Ranger packets, insisting they stop for every wild-life sighting and to collect leaf and fossil tracing whenever they could. It was a long drive, made longer by the way Addie kept looking at Carol. 

When they spotted a moose and her baby from the side of the road, Addie stood close and said, “Now that’s something you only see once in a lifetime.”

When they picnicked under a grove of aspens, purple asters littering the soft ground around them, Addie asked her, “What’s your favorite flower, dear?”

Maria grew stonier and stonier, barely responding to Monica’s questions and refusing to look within three feet of Carol. 

Fury remained utterly in mission-mode, which Carol was grateful for. 

Carol herself felt like every vein is her body was already bleeding. The further north they went, the more she could sense a matching power in the earth. Her bare feet dissolved and re-formed with every step she took. It was a sort of excruciating pain she was only now starting to actually register. Before, the pain was mostly dull, a small reminder of her body being under stress. Now it was agony, somehow separate from her and tempting her—tugging on her—making her human body feel hollow and useless—she longed to _burn_. 

The car was mostly silent as they approached the arch, filled only with the sounds of Monica and Bripteth working on their packet’s crossword puzzle. When they pulled up, it was approaching evening, but the sun was still high in the sky. 

The road was empty. No line of cars trying to get in, none trying to get out. The only sound was the pattern of wilderness, flowing and unobtrusive. They parked on the shoulder, just outside the wall, and Fury got out and walked a distance away to mess with his radio. 

Maria walked to middle of the road and looked up at the words carved above the arch in a concrete plaque embedded in the stones. Carol traced her figure for a moment, sturdy and emotionless, a solitary picture bordered by the rolling yellow foot-hills and an endless blue. 

Carol considered ‘goodbye.’ The thought dashed weightlessly across the surface of her mind. Instead she strode back through the gate, drawn to the beat of something familiar, under the soil and under her skin. 

She walked off the road and into the grass, following the faint pulse, and her agony eased. Though the grass was dry and the weeds sharp, it felt like heaven on her skin—the first touch she had felt in so many long days that wasn’t torture. She knelt down and placed one hand on a flat stone, littered with pale lichen, and inhaled feelingly. 

Something sparked the middle of her palm and she snatched it up in shock. In the center of her hand was that familiar glow, the one from Lawson’s engine, writhing against the heat of her hand. 

“Carol!” Maria called, and Carol closed her hand on instinct, the writhing energy in her hand churning against her fingers like a beating heart. Carol whipped around and Maria and Fury stood on the road, pointing back through the arch at the series of black, bullet-proof SUVs approaching the park. 

Carol kept her hand around the spark and jogged up to Fury and Maria, eyeing the cars warily. 

“What the hell?” she asked quietly. “Those aren’t Ranger vehicles.”

“One of them is,” Maria said. “Must be the superintendent. Not as worried about the Feds as reported.” 

“And the goddman police,” Fury said. “Jesus Christ, what are they here for?”

Addie and Talos stood just inside the archway with Monica and Bripteth. Carol made a move to go to them, but Fury held an arm out.

“We’re the targets,” he said tonelessly. “I told them to stay by the car."

Maria’s mouth was hard as she said, “Targets,” keeping her eyes fixed on the parking cars. 

“I think we may be in more trouble than I anticipated,” Fury said, shaking his small radio, and grimacing. “SHIELD gave me the orders for Marvel to take care of Lawson’s core. Apparently, the CIA, FBI, and World Security Council did not agree.”

“It’s not exactly their jurisdiction,” Maria muttered. 

“ _Weapon_ s are their jurisdiction,” Carol said. 

Fury shifted his weight as the cars pulled up and men in suits and bullet-proof vests, rifles slung over their shoulders, climbed out. Maria caught Fury's drifting arm, and squeezed.

“If you pull that out now,” Maria hissed. “We’re fucking dead.”

“I’m not a fucking moron, Rambeau,” Fury replied, coldly. “I’m just the only one that’s armed.”

Carol tightened her hold on the spark in her palm. 

“Good afternoon!” one of the agents called, tall and formal, sunglasses mirrored and smile friendly. He and the others strode past Talos and Addie, who were holding Bripteth and Monica behind them. Addie looked ready to spit. 

They came within twenty yards of Maria, Carol, and Fury. The police came up to stand under the arch with the others, two of them holding two Rangers handcuffed. 

“I think there’s been a minor miscommunication, Agent Fury,” the agent said. 

“And who might you be?” Fury called, moving slightly to get in between Carol and Maria. 

“Call me Smith,” the man replied genially, one hand coming up to press politely against his chest. “Agent Smith.”

“Sure,” Fury said. “That’s the good faith I was looking for—just the kind of thing to ease my mind about the combat team you brought with ya.” 

Smith laughed dryly. “Listen, Fury,” he said, taking one step closer. A man at his right with a tranq gun stepped with him. “We’re gonna need a little cooperation, that’s all. Now, I know you're under orders from SHIELD, but—and it’s not your fault if you missed it—but I’ve been informed that you were recently taken off that mission. So you can understand why I’m a little confused at your presence here, right?”

“Feeling’s mutual,” Fury said. 

Smith frowned, just slightly. 

“Agent Fury,” he said. “I’m going to ask you to come with me. You and your—associates. I don’t want to have to report to my superiors that I have a rogue agent on my hands. Do you want that?”

Fury opened his mouth to retort but a strained voice cut him off. 

“They’re trying to extract the—” It was the female Ranger. The officer holding her clapped a hand over her mouth, driving a fist into her stomach. 

Carol’s eyes snapped back to the agent. 

“I’m sorry, you’re doing what?” she asked, arms flexing. “Are you really that stupid?”

“They’re the CIA,” Maria said. “Of course they’re that stupid.”

“You’re going to accidentally drop an _atom bomb_ on the largest active volcano on the planet,” Carol spat. She took one step forward and every agent had a gun trained on her. 

“We are acting in the interests of national security,” Smith said cooly. “What happens the next time an extraterrestrial force threatens us? What’s the guarantee that you can protect us, Captain Marvel? Look at you. You can barely hold yourself together as we speak.”

Carol was starting to glow—the rotten sort of light that turned her skin sulfuric yellow. 

“And why _is_ that, huh?” Carol asked. “This”—she gestured to herself—“is the energy you’re trying to weaponize. You won’t be able to control it better than I can. Not even the most advanced civilizations in the galaxy can.”

Agent Smith sighed and put his hands on his hips. “Marvel, if you don’t stand down, we’re going to have a problem.”

“If you set her off,” Fury said. “You set the caldera off. You don’t have the firepower to contain her.”

Smith snorted. “Don’t we?” He nodded behind him and a man stepped forward with a silver gun—it’s barrel lit up with a sickly blue. 

“Are you mother-fuckers serious?” Fury snapped. “HYDRA weapons? Here? _In Yellowstone_?”

“Stand down,” Smith said. “You’re under arrest.”

“Mom!” Monica’s desperate voice rang out. “Auntie!”

At her cry, Fury stepped in front of Carol and drew his handgun in one rapid movement, training it on Smith. The man with the core-weapon didn’t hesitate to fire. 

“ _NO—_ ” Carol reacted without thinking, launching the spark in her hand straight at the repulsive gun. It met the blast four feet in front of Fury’s face, sparked like lightning, and struck the earth, ripping into the road’s asphalt. 

Carol clutched her head at the shriek of pain that rose from the ground, spiking directly into her skull. There was a fire on the brink of combustion, one the mountains could no longer hold back. The agent screamed as the gun in his hands started burning. He dropped it and it hit the ground with a deep and penetrating thud. 

Smith watched as the gun started melting back into the earth and Carol tried to focus her vision, her power, focus on anything. The agony had returned ten-fold—only now she could feel everything in the ground for miles—she could feel the rhizome of aspens—the bubbling geysers and poisonous mud-baths—every inch of earth where her sister-energy wove and expanded. Her body couldn’t contain the yearning for fire and fission and fusion anymore—

“Alright,” Smith said. “Take him out.” 

The tranq fired and Fury collapsed on the road. 

“ _Fuck_ ,” Carol intoned, moving her hands to her stomach to keep her insides from spilling out. “Maria.”

Carol met Maria’s wide and horrified eyes and saw something there she hadn’t seen in long time. Unadulterated and sparkling anger. 

~

“Carol, you have to breathe,” Maria said, reaching out a hand to hover over Carol’s hunched shoulders. “Please, calm down. You’re cracking.”

“I—I need—I _have_ to stop,” Carol hissed, clutching at her sides with dissolving palms. “They’re going to _kill_ everything—”

Maria peered briefly over at Talos, Addie, and Bripteth, who were all now standing behind Monica’s long outstretched arms next to the Rangers. She met Monica’s wild eyes and some new awareness pulsed in the line between their stares. Monica mouthed, _Breathe_. 

“Captain Rambeau,” Smith called. “You’re facing one helluva court martial. If you want to save your career and protect family—”

“Oh, fuck off,” Maria said. “I ain’t a fucking moto Army grunt you can intimidate.”

“This is your last warning,” Smith said. “Leave now or you’re declaring yourselves enemies of the state.”

“As if I haven’t been that my entire life,” Maria replied, so angry she felt empty. Carol was still trembling next to her, Fury’s body still on the ground near their feet. 

“I’m going to give you one more chance to stand down, otherwise you’re facing life in prison.”

“Oh my god,” Carol sparked. Her voice sounded as if it was coming from five different places in the air around her. Her whole body was shimmering like an ember—crackling like one, too. “Go— _blow yourself_ —you fascist piece of shit!”

Smith was silent for one breath. Then he nodded at the sniper with the tranquilizer who raised it and aimed at Maria. 

 Carol stepped forward, hand reached out, putting herself in front of Maria’s body. The tranq never reached them. 

It was only one bullet. From a handgun, no less. One of the police officers standing ‘guard’ over the protesting Rangers reacted too quickly at Carol’s sudden movement and the bullet found its target in her head. 

When Carol exploded, so did the traces of the core winding deep into the soil. When the core exploded, so did the volcano. The ground cracked open, like Carol’s skin, and wet mudslides hit super-heated earth, water instantly evaporating, dirt particles sublimating—the geysers all started spewing magma instead of boiling water—the forests were set alight—the whole of the landscape descended into hell within seconds. 

Through the fire and the darkened sky, Maria searched desperately for Monica, choking on smoke, tears, and terror, but all she saw was heat and all she heard was the screech of rock on stone. 

She fell to her hands and knees, digging her fingers into the roiling earth. She could feel her own skin blistering and her brain shutting down for lack of oxygen. She needed to bend this all back to only a few minutes before—fix everything. 

Only she couldn’t. She pulled and pulled but there was no water left—the lava surfacing ran off all moisture from the air. It was an unmatched combustion and Maria was too weak against it. She fell on her side, reaching out for the fiery blue star hovering in the space where Carol had just stood. It seethed, growing larger, eating up all the matter daring to brush too close. 

 _Swallow me whole_ , Maria begged. _I can’t do this anymore.  
_

Her eyes slipped close and the ash peeled her away. 

~

“Just keep breathing,” Monica said tonelessly. Addie’s fingers were gripping her forearm, trying to move Monica back behind her, but Monica barely registered the effort. All her focus was on her mother and Carol, standing tall and defiant and protective over Fury’s body, framed like heroes against the rolling green hills and the long park road. Carol was losing control but she held her ground, shoulder to shoulder with Maria. 

“Just keep breathing,” Monica told herself. “Count it out. In French.”

She breathed in and out, paced and deep. _Un, Deux, Trois, Quatre, Cinq…_

Something under her bare feet was breathing. Monica could feel it matching her rhythm. Like the pulse in her mother’s neck—where Monica had frequently rested her head. 

Maria caught Monica’s steady gaze. Monica exhaled and mouthed to her, _Breathe._

When the world exploded, Monica was at the peak of her inhale. 

~

Maria’s eyes flickered open as the ashy-sediment was pulled out of her lungs. Standing above her was Monica, her arms spread wide, the tips of her fingers shining an unrelenting moony-silver. Clear air swirled around her, doming over the heads of the agents, Rangers, Fury, Talos, Bripteth and Addie. 

“How—” Maria whispered, her throat far too dry to speak. She pushed herself to her knees. “Monica.”

Monica still managed to hear her over the tumbling wind and fire. She turned, keeping her arms spread, and said, “Breathe with me, mama. Gotta cool it down.”

Maria could see the earth gluing itself back together. The tremors in the ground already felt weaker and though the fires raged on and the air choked on itself, the caldera was going back to sleep. Monica was putting it back to sleep. 

Maria looked to the growing star now bursting several feet above their heads. She inhaled and held it, counted to ten, and exhaled. In her breath she saw a spark of green, a drop of water from her own body glimmering in the air. She stumbled to her feet and wrapped her arms around Monica’s precious head. 

“Together, then,” Maria whispered into her curls, certain Monica would understand. “Count to ten.” Monica gripped Maria’s waist and pressed her face against Maria’s neck. She could feel the chill of Monica’s tears hitting her chest. 

 _My daughter_ , Maria thought as she inhaled. _Monica._  

Their chests rose together and on the exhale, Maria could feel the ash pushing against them. They breathed together and pushed back. 

It could have been an eternity—Maria could have held Monica to her breast for longer—just holding. But soon Maria became aware of Monica’s sobs. 

“Mommy, Mommy.”

“Shh, darling,” Maria whispered, throat still baked. “It’s okay, my darling. You’re okay.”

Maria looked up and though the impenetrable ash-clouds were gone and the earth was still, the grass and forests were aflame and the air was hot. 

“Maria!” 

Maria clutched Monica tight in relief as Talos, Bripteth, and Addie ran up to her, all dirty and scabbed and choking, but alive. Talos knelt down to pick up Fury’s body, effortlessly taking his weight. Bripteth and Addie shoved into Maria and Monica’s embrace, and Maria watched astounded as Addie hid her tears in Maria’s shoulder. 

“We need to get out of here,” Talos said, his face pinched and sober. “She’s going to blow.” 

He nodded to Carol, still hovering and combusting above their heads. The star was still sucking in matter, dragging up the remnants of the core from the earth, freeing the dirt of its own radiation. 

“What’s she doing?” Maria whispered.

“She’s freeing the planet,” Talos said. “Freeing the planet from Dr. Lawson’s core. She’s going to let it all loose. Back into the universe. Back into entropy.”

“We’re all about to be a crater,” Addie said, horrified. 

“What about them?” Bripteth asked, gesturing to the huddled mass of agents and officers. 

Maria tenderly transferred Monica to Addie and said, “Get them to the car and get out of here. I’ll be right behind you.”

“No, Mom,” Monica tried to grab onto Maria, desperate. “No, _please_ —”

The grass-fire Monica had quieted was spreading in their periphery. The crumbled road leading out of the park was no defense at all. Everything around them was either cast in a sickly orange glow from the fire or the shining pure-blue under Carol’s fissioning energy. 

“Darling, I promise you,” Maria said. “I am not leaving you.”

“You’re my only—” Monica gasped wetly, but Maria didn’t let her finish. 

“Keep them safe, hon,” Maria said. “They need you.” 

Monica blinked as Maria pressed a quick kiss to her temple. 

“Go,” Maria said, raising her eyebrows at Addie. Talos nudged Bripteth, and soon Monica was directing them back toward the arch and the abandoned Fed SUVs . Maria whipped around, sparing herself an emotional final glance. 

“Hey!” she shouted, running up to the officers who were still trying to contain the Rangers and the agents who were eyeing Carol’s growing star. “You need to get the fuck out of here, now!”

“The fire!” the female Ranger answered. “We have to move quickly before—”

Maria speared her finger at Carol and screamed, “The fire ain’t the biggest problem here! She’s about to go off again!”

“What’s she doing?” Smith said dazedly, fitting his sunglasses into place so he could look up at her. “What _is_ she? What do you mean she’s about to—”

Maria grabbed him by the neck and hoisted him up until the tips of his shoes barely glanced across the ground. 

“I said we need to leave. Now.” 

She set him gently down and looked to the others. The officers were already sprinting back to their cars, the other agents close behind. Smith tripped to follow, pulling out his radio, and screaming for a helicopter. 

“Come on,” the female Ranger said, jogging up to Maria. “Got space in our truck.”

Maria shook her head. 

“Get out of here,” she replied cooly, her fists glimmering a bright green. “I’ll be right behind you.”

The Ranger didn’t look convinced but she didn’t argue, following after her partner. With a satisfied glance past the park's shattered wall, Maria noted the line of cars racing down the road. 

~

Monica screamed for the car to stop. Addie slammed on the brakes in terror as she tried to scramble out the back door of the SUV. 

“Monica!” 

Addie pulled onto the shoulder and dove out of the car, Talos and Bripteth not far behind. Monica was staring back down to the miraculously standing arch. The star-that-was-Carol grew larger than ever, still bright despite the gained distance. Underneath it was a small verdant glow. 

_“Mom!”_

~

Maria could just barely make out the flickerings of Carol’s form underneath the bright fission of core-energy. Streams of energy were being sucked back into Carol from the veins of radiation winding throughout the earth.

It was a good plan. Many for the price of one. Maria’s dire mind could already read the etching in a tombstone— “For the benefit...of the people.”

“Carol!” she yelled, her heart thrashing about in her chest, hissing, _what about me what about my life what about my benefit._ The star burned on. “Carol!”

The last of Dr. Lawson’s core left the ashy-ground. Maria inhaled, held it, then exhaled. The air billowing in front of her chest shimmered and Maria narrowed her focus and pulled.

.

.

.

.

 

.

 

.

She stood in the bayou again, water brushing sweetly against her thighs. The sudden quiet burst her ears, and her mind eased into the space vacated by the rushing noise of fire and erupting rock. She flexed her hands and the whole of the stream lit up with verdant fireflies and glimmering dust.The lights reflected in the mostly still water and then Maria said, “Show me.” 

The surface flashed with an image of Carol’s star collapsing. Maria flicked her fingers. Another image emerged, and Carol collapsed again. Another image, another Carol gone. Another. Another. Another. Carol dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. 

_“Show me.”_

Every molecule of water projected the same outcome, the same death. 

“This isn’t right,” Maria whispered through her tears, sinking to her knees, so the water cradled her hunched back. “Infinite variations—it’s mathematically impossible they’re all the same. Infinite universes and she has to live in _one_.” 

Maria thrust her hand into the stream, pushed her fingers past the tangle of river-moss and soft sediment and pulled and pulled and pulled. 

“She does not belong to time.” 

The beautiful knight was back, kneeling in front of her, sans sword and the white glow. His eyes were kind and sad. 

“You cannot change this. She is neither doomed or un-doomed. She is out of the reach of time.”

“That’s impossible!” Maria sobbed. “No one is out of the reach of time— _nothing_ is!”

The man sighed. The sunlight shining on him was tinged like a rainbow. 

“She is a singularity above time—she could traverse in our existence—but now she has lifted out of it, and you cannot reach her.”

Maria remembered Addie’s finger lift off the napkin. Disappearing from the walkable and touchable plane. Forever above a world that missed her presence. 

Suddenly, and finally, it was too much for Maria. 

She screamed into the peaceful waters of her home.

She longed to rip her body to pieces and hang her useless hands on barbed wire. She wanted to smash the wood of her flesh like that guitar she had made for her mother so long ago. She wanted the pain to end— she wanted to lock herself away in black marble—she never wanted to see the sun again—what was she being punished for?

"No, no, no, no, _no...."_

In the stream, scenes from Maria’s memory glared in the refracting sunlight. 

Carol tying her hair up in a bun. 

Carol singing to baby Monica. 

Carol on her front porch: _I’m going to be here anyway. You can’t stop me._

And beneath those bright moments, different colors swam through the muddy water. 

Addie holding her hand while she cried at her grandmother’s grave. 

Her mother strumming delicately on her homemade guitar. 

Her grandmother swinging her around in the sun-dial garden at the museum. 

Addie looking up into the Texas-sky: _You don’t get gratitude from pain or sacrifice._

_Stop interrogating your love. You don’t know better. Neither do I._

Nicole tuning her fiddle with a wry grin: _I’m going to make the whole world as blue as me._

Carol holding her hand out to her at a honky-tonk, laughing. 

Digging her hands and toes into the fresh and moist dirt of Rusty Wilson’s garden. His face swam through the storm of images:

_A promise to God is a promise to faith—and against death. God is love. Who doesn’t love a wedding?_

Maria coughed and stifled her last sob, suffocating on her bulbous glittering love, threatening to untie her from the ground, from the dirt. 

_Who doesn’t love a wedding?_

Maria closed her eyes against the shine of Rusty’s smile and the deep feel of soothing soil. She prodded her body internally, tracing the lines of her blood, and thought,  _Now_  This _is faith, church be damned._

She opened her eyes, rooted to the earth.

“Show me,” she asked. The light drifted on the stream and then revealed a new scene. 

Maria plunged both her hands deep into the mud, letting loose the love she had been afraid to let burn, and she broke through to the other side.

~

Maria opened her eyes to Carol on the verge of complete and exhaustible combustion. The singed earth around her was starting to sprout marsh grass, and amid the bright flames encroaching on the cooled lava-fields surrounding her, Maria could see spots of emerald dragonflies and lightning bugs buzzing through the smoke. 

She lifted her chin and shouted, “Carol!” She received no response, but unfazed she shouted again. 

“Carol,” Maria clenched her fists and pulled on the water around her. “You’re going to be late!”

Carol’s energy flickered gold for a moment, before dissolving back to blue. 

_There she is._

“Carol, you dumbass!” Maria shouted, her chest aching with too much longing. “You’re going to be late!” 

Another burst of gold in the blue. 

“Carol!” Maria tried one more time, her voice broken. “Don’t you wanna marry me?”

The entirety of Carol’s star transformed from blue fire into a gleaming golden figure, melting but heavy—she fell back to ground, weight returned to her. Before she could break on the cold-lava-rock, Maria clenched her fists and pulled once more—

—an cypress shot out of the stone, billowy and fresh like a clean sheet drying on the line, and its branches swayed gracefully to catch Carol and set her gently on the ground—

—golden pupil-less eyes met Maria’s brown ones—

_“Do you, Maria Rosine Rambeau, take Carol Susan Jane Danvers…”_

Maria saw only green; cypresses bursting out of the pools of hardened lava, shattering the dryness; new water bubbling forth between their tall roots; lichen moving rapidly into soft moss-beds, where Maria could now walk barefoot on the earth; she took her boots off, it was sacred ground; Carol’s golden glow was gently blowing away; the stream began to wash off her molten gold. 

_“And do you, Carol Susan Jane Danvers, take Maria Rosine Rambeau…”_

Maria reached out and placed her palm firmly and flushed against the exposed skin of Carol’s cheek. 

“I do,” she said. 

Carol opened her eyes, the gold gone. She smiled. 

“I do.”

Maria let go of the world and it snapped back. 

~

The undersides of Carol’s eyelids were emerald. As she blinked back into focus, it faded and all she was left with was ordinary sunlight. The ash-clouds were gone, the fires quenched, and ground un-burnt by flowing lava. The air was clean and the wilderness untouched. Carol lay on the un-broken road, attempting to take it all in. The grass and wildflowers rang crisp in the breeze—the earth smelled of candied pollen. Then a shadow appeared over her shoulder. 

Maria knelt by her head, a quaking hand hovering over Carol’s chest. Her eyes were searching. 

Carefully, Carol lifted one of her arms and brought her fingers within touching distance of Maria’s. Swallowing, she brushed the side of her index against the tip of Maria’s ring finger. Warmth instantly bloomed within her, and she almost panicked, before registering its familiar thrill. The warmth, the love, of touching Maria. 

Carol met Maria’s eyes, dark and beautiful and shining with un-shed tears; she ran her eyes over the lines of her shoulders, reflecting the summer sun, and across the dark-brown of her cheeks and the top of her nose; she ended on Maria’s lips, stretching into far a hearty grin. 

“Maria,” Carol breathed, reaching backwards to skim Maria’s sweaty hairline with her thumb. 

In a breath, Carol was jumping up and throwing herself into Maria’s arms. She wrapped her legs around Maria’s laughing waist and her arms around her wonderfully curved shoulders, pushing so far into Maria’s body, they would have tipped over if not for Maria’s newfound physical strength. They were as strong as each other, so Carol didn’t have to worry as she squeezed and held and pressed. 

Maria was outwardly weeping—big deep sobs that hummed right against Carol’s sternum. Carol shoved her nose behind Maria’s ear and breathed in the smell of her from so close. She kept one palm cupped around Maria’s shoulder and the other running across the tight curls on her head. 

“Maria, Maria, Maria,” she breathed, in and out. Maria’s arms had made their way under Carol’s t-shirt, and Carol started crying herself at the overwhelming contact. She pulled back a little, slipping her legs back around so she could find proper leverage as she started raining kisses down on Maria’s damp and heated face. 

“Carol,” Maria said, shaking her head. “Carol, wait—lemme—”

She released one hand from Carol’s back and placed it steadily on her jaw. Carol took the hint without hesitation and met Maria’s lips with her own. 

The ache of it was almost more than either could handle, both fighting grins and sobs alike, but with each brush of their lips, the need grew, and soon Carol’s hand was back on Maria’s head, guiding her into a prolonged kiss. 

Maria pulled back and gathered Carol back into her lap, Carol’s legs stretched across her thighs. Carol stroked Maria’s back while she cried, kissing her temple, the crown of her head, her cheek, and each eye. Maria’s face pushed into her neck and Carol let the fingers of her other hand linger over Maria’s eyebrows and jaw and ears. 

As Maria quieted, Carol asked, “We didn’t actually just get married, did we?”

Maria snorted wetly and pressed even closer to Carol. 

“Hmm,” she said, voice wrecked and tired. “No. But we will, so in a way it already happened.”

“And how does that work, exactly?” 

Maria shrugged, “I’ll tell you later.”

Carol’s playful protest was interrupted by the patter of footsteps and the impact of an emotional girl fully tackling them to the ground. 

“Don’t you ever, don’t you ever do that again,” Monica managed through her tears. 

“Never again,” Maria promised, pushing Monica’s hair out of her face. 

“As long as we both shall live,” Carol added brightly, encircling her arms around them both. 

~


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Here's all the music referenced in the story--in case anyone was curious:
> 
> Elizabeth Cotten, “Frieght Train”—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8UN_6AUgCw
> 
> Alice Coltrane, “Journey In Satchidananda”—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQtEFdyhgdE
> 
> Woody Guthrie, “Red River Valley”—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM54-ZRd-9k
> 
> Nina Simone, “In the Morning”—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=likF-DBSOr8
> 
> PJ Harvey, “This is Love”—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STxXS5lLunE
> 
> B.B. King, “Sweet Little Angel”—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNr_eIgP0tI
> 
> Beach Boys, “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on my Shoulders)”—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gikGLzkKElw
> 
> Waylon Thibodeaux, “Jolie Blonde”—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yistA2MlR4
> 
> Lead Belly, “In the Pines”—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MkfTYPmLlA
> 
> The Judds, “Grandpa”—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt6-ZtOL_gY
> 
> Emmylou Harris, “Boulder to Birmingham”—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0oemBPggGI
> 
> Mariah Carey, “Always Be My Baby”—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj-fw3r__-c&list=PLncKGQLcRq9BYzCt9caab_d0E2WWYjly4&index=5

They were arrested briefly, piled into police cars, trucks and macho SUVs, and then locked in the back room of the Visitor’s Center a few miles down the road. As they were marched in hand-cuffs through the lobby, Ranger Carla, the park’s superintendent, cheerfully greeted wide-eyed visitors and the other Rangers manning the desk. 

While they sat on the floor, all cuffed except Carol who was just tagging along, Talos turned to Carla and her associate: “How can I get one of those spiffy hats?”

Fury groaned and dropped his head on his knees. “Please,” he said. “Just give him one.”

“I want one too,” Monica announced form her perch on Carol’s lap. 

“I found all the scat!” Bripteth shouted. 

While Carla good-naturedly swore Monica and Bripteth in as Junior Rangers and told Talos that if he wanted a hat, she could find one for him, Maria pressed closer into Carol’s side, hiding her face behind Carol’s shoulder, breathing in her solid skin and warmth. 

Agent Smith came in with a smug Agent Coulson. 

“I think,” Smith said without inflection. “There’s been a misunderstanding.”

~

Addie and Monica insisted they camp for one night before heading back home. Carla found them a vacant campsite and dropped them off with a bundle of firewood. 

“We’ve had an unusually rainy season,” she said. “But let’s be extra careful with the campfire anyway.”

Talos put up the tents while Fury took a mini-nap in a patch of setting sun, still recovering from the tranq. Everyone once in awhile his eye would flicker open to watch Talos carefully guide Bripteth and Monica as they threaded the tent-poles and clipped on the rain-flies. Addie made the hot cocoa and when Carol tried to help her with the sandwiches, she grabbed her face with both her hands and said: 

“Carol—you’ve done enough.”

The light from their small fire lit up Addie’s wrinkled face kindly. In the velvet hold of her hands, Carol felt some darkness lift off her chest. Then Addie leaned close and whispered so low Carol could barely make it out, “I think you deserve each other. After everything.” She let go and went back to the water spigot, singing airily, _In the evening, I will fl-y-y-y-y you to the moon._

Carol turned to Maria, where she sat leaning against a rock by the fire, picking at Addie’s guitar, wearing one of Carol’s flannels, and smiling softly. Carol bit back the overwhelmed and pathetic weeping seeking escape from her blubbering mouth, and she went to her. 

“Hey, B.B. King,” Carol said as she plopped down next to her, careful not to spill her cocoa (food tasted so much better when she wasn’t falling apart), and careful also to sit so she had at least three points of contact with Maria. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“I know you’re joking,” Maria said, turning to her with a tiny smirk. “But I feel I should warn you that you’re invoking the name ‘B.B. King’ without the proper reverence. And that simply will not do.”

Carol laughed, more surprised at the familiar than she should have been. “I feel like I’ve been accused of this before—not showing enough respect for your heroes.”

Maria ducked her head, lips spreading into an actual smile. “Ain’t heroes. Just people.”

“And that’s why they call it the blues,” Carol quoted placidly. 

Maria said. “I am ignoring you.”

Carol sipped her cocoa, trying not to let it spill out of her mouth through her grin. 

Maria strummed along, a clumsy downward stroke with the flesh of her thumb, barely setting the strings vibrating. 

“I think,” Maria said. “I think I’d like to actually learn how to play this.”

“I think you’d be brilliant at it,” Carol said sincerely but modulating her excitement so as not to scare Maria off. “You’ve got the brainpower. And the weirdly encyclopedic knowledge of every old folk and blues song. Also, it’s hot.”

“I’ll learn guitar,” Maria said, smile playful but bright, lifting her chin, her eyes catching on the first stars appearing beyond the pine needles in the sky. “You’ll sing. We’ll get Monica a fiddle. Addie already plays harmonica. It’ll be a family band.”

“Yeah,” Carol said, putting her forehead on Maria’s bicep, where it rested on the top of the guitar. “We’ll rent a house-boat, serenade the neighbors.” 

“You’ll wear the straw-hat,” Maria said. “I’ll wear the overalls.” 

“Also hot,” Carol said, far too emotional. Maria tilted her head down, keeping gaze past the tree-tops, and placed a large hand on Carol’s cheek. 

The others interrupted, circling round the campfire with plates of sandwiches, chips, and cocoa. Addie produced a bag of marshmallows out of thin air, to Fury’s poorly concealed delight, and took the guitar back from Maria. 

Carol sat up a little straighter and Maria immediately twisted so she was nearly in Carol’s lap. She lay her head on chest, nosed along her collar-bone, and breathed in. Carol’s arms went easily around her, one hand floating up to cradle her head and the other to rest heavily on Maria’s knee. 

They stayed quiet as Addie lectured everyone about the proper way to roast a marshmallow and Fury had a fierce disagreement with her. The conversation rapidly devolved into friendly vitriolics until Talos got Monica and Bripteth talking about their new Junior Ranger duties. Carol tried to listen in, but with the weight of Maria in her arms, her attention inevitably drifted away. Absently, she started humming and at Maria’s watery sigh against her neck, she started singing:

_“From this valley they say you are going,_  
_We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile,_  
_For they say you are taking the sunshine,_  
_That has brightened our pathways awhile._

_Come and sit by my side if you love me,_  
_Do not hasten to bid me adieu,_  
_Just remember the Red River Valley,_  
_And the cowboy that loves you so true….”_

~

The wedding was simple. It had to be. There was no church in the South that would marry them—only the people’s church in their small community in the swamp. Maw Maw Wilson’s daughter and sister got a small bakery and cafe in New Orleans to donate a cake and five very large greasy bags of beignets. They also drove in fairy-lights and lanterns and Rusty Wilson set up about twenty mosquito repellent candles all over Addie’s back yard. The reception was a pot-lock and someone brought a bunch of scrap-wood for a dance floor. The band used Addie’s back porch as a stage and Fury and Talos finagled delicately with a speaker system and lights, so as not to have an unfortunate blow-out. Monica dressed Kimmy’s old Rooster in a beaded scarf but wore a flowery purple dress herself, barefoot, with flowers that Addie braided into her hair. Bripteth wore a pair of yellow denim overalls and her own skin. 

In place of signing a marriage license, Carol signed for Monica’s adoption, and Monica glowed as she read over the paper legally gifting her with two moms. 

Their vows were simple—the traditional sort. But when the time came to seal the union with a kiss, Carol accidentally lit up in photon energy and scared the rooster and neighborhood dogs. 

Maria was sitting on the blanket in the grass, watching Talos, Fury, and Bripteth toss around her new frisbee, watching Addie with the band changing our her C harmonica for G, and watching Carol twirling Monica around the dance-floor, both shining with joy. Bripteth soon came to dance with Monica, dragging Sammy Wilson into it, and Carol skipped over to Maria. She held out a hand, raised her eyebrows, and said tenderly, “You owe me a dance.”

As Maria had never been very good at partner-dancing, she took the lead, keeping an eye on the other couples on the floor, the neighbors who really didn’t care that they were at a lesbian-wedding ceremony, they just wanted an excuse to eat and drink and dance with each other. She held Carol close, letting go of her fear for just this night. Her arm felt so strong around Carol’s waist and when Carol looked at her, eyes almost gray in the twilight, she let herself feel everything. 

“You have no idea how much I love you,” Maria said. “How much I’ve loved you since you told me I had stars in my eyes.”

Carol scoffed, “What, you mean when I completely embarrassed myself and you didn’t talk to me for a week?”

Maria shook her head, brushing her nose against Carol’s. “I’ve tried all my life—fought all my life—to stay in control. And then you came along, _blonde_ and reckless and angry and _annoying_ and I couldn’t control how I felt about you. You used to scare me, so much.”

Carol’s eyes were wet and when she spoke, it was rough, “Maria. You’re the reason, god, you’re the reason for everything. I can’t stop looking at you. I could never stop looking at you.”

The rested against each-other, staying in rhythm. 

“I want a life with you,” Maria said. “Don’t run off again. Please.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Carol said, nudging her head closer. “My life is with you, no matter what.”

Carol dropped her head into the space between Maria’s neck and shoulder, breathing deeply. The song changed to a slower one, and Carol let their dancing shift into a back and forth sway. Maria rested her cheek on the side of Carol’s head, pressing a kiss to the tip of her ear. 

Then she looked up at the clear sky. The dear burden of Carol’s hand and body against her, the music, the crinkle of wind in spanish-moss, and the matching sway of the cypresses—the evening dripped like honey into her memory, and with a flash of green in her mind’s eye, she committed her love to singular eternity. 


End file.
